Does different mean difficult? Contrastivity and foreign language reading: Some data on reading in German

In this article, we present data from a research project on reading in German as a foreign language. The main research focus of the project was the relevance and the difficulty of understanding certain grammatical structures of German. Our data provide a good basis for new insights into the question whether, how and when contrastivity and transfer of syntactic structures across languages influence in any significant way the acquisition of receptive competences in a foreign language. The results show that foreign language readers with a Romance L1 do not necessarily have problems in understanding German sentences containing contrastive structures, that is, structures that do not exist in their L1. A comparison of semantically equivalent sentences containing either contrastive or non-contrastive structures showed that only three out of seven contrastive structures are more difficult than their non-contrastive counterparts.