Abstract
The topic of this paper is Eckman’s “Markedness Differential Hypothesis” and its application to Second as well as to Third and Additional Language Acquisition. Its aim is to predict the occurrence of difficulties and the probability of transfer phenomena during the acquisition process on the basis of differences in markedness between the languages in question. Therefore, it relates the notion of difficulty to order of acquisition. The hypothesis proposed in this paper, however, claims, that in order to predict difficulty, it is not sufficient to solely consider the direction of acquisition. As will be shown, the direction of language processing (production or reception of foreign language utterances) plays a major role, too. The paper gives some evidence from a cross-linguistic comprehension test between different Slavic languages, that may prove the different relation of markedness and difficulty in reception tasks.
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