Little has been done to test or describe reading strategies of second language learners. The study reported in this paper was an attempt to begin to investigate the nature of perceptual strategies which second language learners employ when reading certain English structures, and to ask the question of whether second language learners, when learning to read, are guided by strategies which result in specific errors. Three structures were tested for three language backgrounds -- Japanese, Spanish, and Persian -- based on a combined contrastive and error analysis. Two problem structures were tested for each language group, one involving a specific, predictable error, the other involving general difficulty. Thirty college ESL (English as a second language) students served as subjects, ten from each language group. Results included the following: (1) subjects had more difficulty with test items than with non-test items; (2) there seems to be a correlation between the two results from the two testing devices; and (3) subjects misprocessed the sentences in ways predicted in the case of the Spanish and Persian subjects, but not in the case of the Japanese subjects. Generally, it seems that a contrastive investigation of surface structures of the native and target languages is helpful in predicting areas likely to cause processing difficulties. (AM)