The study examines which strategies native speakers of German, native speakers of Japanese and advanced German learners of Japanese adopt when linking information in narrative texts (film retellings). The main results are as follows: (a) The L1 German speakers organize temporal shift-relations in order to link information, whereas the protagonist in topic function is often maintained across utterances. In contrast, the Japanese speakers prefer to compare series of events involving each of the main characters by organizing a shift in the entity domain. (b)The L2 strategies cannot be explained by a single feature, as various factors are seen to interact in the L2 speakers' decision making. In particular, the organization of information from the domain of time is directly related to the principles in the source language.

The empirical study investigates how native speakers of Japanese, native speakers of German and advanced German learners of Japanese organise information for establishing coherence when retelling a film story. There are differences found between the two L1 groups: (a) The speakers of German employ various lexical items (e.g., dann ‘then’) for organization of a text-intrinsic shift in the temporal domain, whereas the verbal aspect in Japanese suffices for this purpose. (b) The speakers of Japanese often take the protagonist’s point of view for description of the situation which the protagonist perceives at his now in the narrative world, whereas the speakers of German adhere to their own perspective. (c) This is connected with the different ways for establishing causal coherence. Moreover, the analysis of the L2 retellings suggests that the principles of information organization in the target language are not evident to the adult learners mind and eye. These results are discussed in respect of the relationship between the typological features of the L1/L2 ([+/− verbal aspect, +/− subjectivity-prominent]) and the principles of information organization. In particular, the study focuses on the role of the grammaticised notions STATE, EVENT, and POINT OF VIEW in L1/L2 production.