Fifty-two institutionalized mentally handicapped children (average CA of 12 years) were engaged in a study attempting to determine whether there are ordinal dependencies in various scales of developmental milestones or supra-structural behaviors in language, and if so, the degree to which hierarchical levels within given categories serve as…

This paper is an attempt to show what parameters come into play when dealing with the problem of difficulty in foreign language learning. After subjecting the hierarchy of difficulty set up by R.P. Stockwell and J.D. Bowen to a critical examination, the author discusses various parameters such as individual and national difficulties, the…