An investigation of the language transfer in second language (L2) lexico-semantic development looked at the relationship of the level of L2 proficiency and interlingual patterns of lexico-semantic correspondence. The linguistic categories used were verbs and adjectives. Relative degrees of difficulty for L2 learners were determined for four interlingual patterns: congruence, convergence, divergence, and semantic gap. It was hypothesized that the patterns would show an order of difficulty such that convergence would be more difficult than congruence and semantic gap would be more difficult than divergence. A short-answer test on these patterns was administered to 300 Japanese studying English in Japan, and results showed that within the verb condition, the patterns' order of difficulty was, in ascending order, congruence-divergence-convergence-semantic gap, and for the adjective condition the order was congruence-convergence-divergence-semantic gap. Individual analyses of stimuli indicated that L2 semantic development is constrained by language transfer interacting with other factors such as specific-exemplar learning. (MSE)