A study sought to acquire new insights into cross-linguistic processing strategies of native English (NE) readers and native Spanish (NS) readers after they read informational texts organized according to preferred writing styles in Spanish. Previous studies suggest that: NS readers will be more efficient processors of embeddedness than NE readers; NS readers will recall considerably more of the propositional textbase than NE readers; processing strategies at the sentence and paragraph level may differ considerably between groups; and NE readers may sometimes employ a "read and hold" strategy for assembling propositions into their mental representations. Of particular interest are the shapes of the representations created by both groups, particularly their situation models. Participants were 76 native readers of Spanish (NRS) attending high school in Peru and 24 native readers of English (NRS) attending an American high school. Tests were created by the researchers. Nine essays on three different topics were developed; for each topic, researchers created a kernel text. Both groups read texts in Spanish during class times; Spanish readers wrote in Spanish, English readers wrote in English. Proportional recall scores differed significantly between the NRS group and the NRE group. Both groups have similar profiles for the textbase representations of the reading selections, but divergent profiles appear when their inference generation is compared. This dichotomy brings to mind some new hypotheses concerning the shapes of the mental representations for both groups as well as some strategies that may be influencing their processing. Appended are the texts and sample recalls in English and Spanish. (Contains 5 figures and 16 references. (NKA)