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In this article, we present data from a research project on reading in German as a foreign language. The main research focus of the project was the relevance and the difficulty of understanding certain grammatical structures of German. Our data provide a good basis for new insights into the question whether, how and when contrastivity and transfer of syntactic structures across languages influence in any significant way the acquisition of receptive competences in a foreign language. The results show that foreign language readers with a Romance L1 do not necessarily have problems in understanding German sentences containing contrastive structures, that is, structures that do not exist in their L1. A comparison of semantically equivalent sentences containing either contrastive or non-contrastive structures showed that only three out of seven contrastive structures are more difficult than their non-contrastive counterparts.

This paper presents an overview of the results from the research project -The psycholinguistics of a grammar for reading German‖ which has been carried out at the University of Fribourg/Freiburg (CH). The project is based on the idea that the most natural and direct way to multilingualism starts with receptive competence in a third language. In the context of research into European intercomprehension, it investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. To achieve this aim, we worked with especially developed experimental designs. The main research instrument was a reading test which consisted of encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. By way of these articles seven grammatical structures of German were tested for their receptive difficulty, with a particular focus on grammatical structures that are traditionally deemed to be ‗difficult' for learners of German as a second/foreign language. This general opinion, however, is based on teachers' experience and/or production evidence and not on a systematic investigation of comprehension processes. Further research instruments were a German placement test as well as a self-evaluation of the students' competences of reading in other foreign languages. In addition to that, oral translation exercises into the L1 of the participants were carried out which helped to gain further insight into the process of reading comprehension.In our paper, we will discuss under what circumstances certain grammatical structures pose problems to readers at various levels of language proficiency. On the basis of oral translation protocols, of general cognitive (language) processing mechanisms, and the structure of the German language, tentative explanations will be given as to why certain sentences/structures are more difficult to understand than others and why some structures do not seem to be a problem at all. The results of the study allow fine-grained insights into the impediments (or their absence) particular structures represent for in-depth comprehension of German texts at various levels of competence.