Presents study involving university Spanish students testing predictive power of contrastive analysis in terms of accuracy of predicted hierarchy for persistence of phonological errors. Results show problems involving allophone use or nonuse are more persistent than those involving phoneme use or nonuse, and the degree of difficulty of a sound…

Types of hierarchies of pronunciation difficulty are discussed, and a hierarchy based on contrastive analysis plus informal observation is proposed. This hierarchy is less one of initial difficulty than of error persistence. One feature of this hierarchy is that, because of lesser learner awareness and very limited functional load, errors…