Suggests that the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) be revised to incorporate a notion of degree of difficulty which corresponds to the notion of typological markedness. (Author/CFM)

Contrastive analysis a priori predicts facts of possible errors in learning a second language that contrastive analysis a posteriori cannot explain. In a study of relative clause formation, the latter approach shows that students have no trouble, whereas the former approach shows the task to be so difficult that they avoid it. (AG)