Bilingual German fourth-graders are expected to develop greater linguistic awareness than monolingual children and therefore should habitually apply different text-processing strategies compared with German monolingual fourthgraders when comprehending and recalling a text. Bilingual children are expected to process texts from the bottom up, from the text base to the gist, whereas monolingual children should engage in top-down processing, which is indicated, for example, by more text intrusions and inferences. This research attempts to clarify whether bilinguals show this shift in direction of processing when they process cross-linguistic versus mono-linguistic texts. The results of Experiment 1 supported our main hypothesis. Monolingual German fourth-graders had more intrusions than same-aged German-English (L1-L2) bilingual children. In Experiment 2, nearly balanced German-English and German-dominant children were tested separately in within-language free recall in both languages and in across-language text recall. For nearly balanced bilingual children, within-and cross-language recall was equally efficient in both languages but not for Germandominant bilingual children -in their recall, more intrusions appeared in their L2 recall. Top-down processing seems to increase when it is in the weaker language. Engaging in bottom-up processing apparently is associated with cognitive functioning in L1.Most work on language processing in bilingual children focuses on word and sentence processing. This research explored a more complex aspect of bilingual language processing: the way in which bilinguals process texts in each language and across both languages. Under conditions of cross-linguistic recall, memory of the text probably relies solely on conceptual memory because retrieval requires new encoding in another language. Mono-linguistic recall may rely on dual processes in memory: verbatim and gist traces formed during the comprehension and recall stages. The first focus of this study attempted to clarify whether gist and verbatim processing are enhanced or impaired in monolingual versus bilingual children and in bilingual children's mono-linguistic versus cross-linguistic text recall. The second focus explored monolinguals' and bilinguals' direction of processing (i.e. bottom-up or top-down) in mono-linguistic tasks compared with cross-linguistic tasks. Due to bilingual children's greater linguistic awareness (see, e.g., Bialystok, 2001), we contended that bilinguals, more than monolinguals, develop a habit of increased bottom-up processing, whereas monolinguals tend to rely more on processing in the opposite direction.