This thematic issue explores various aspects of interlanguage phonetics and phonology and their relationship to general linguistic theory. Research in interlanguage syntax and recently in discourse and pragmatics has been quite prolific; however, research in interlanguage phonetics and phonology has produced far fewer studies. Of the nearly 200 articles published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) during the last 10 years, only about a dozen focus on phonetics and phonology. This thematic issue is intended to fill some of this gap.

The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English and Mandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and a sentence-transcription (dictee) task. Ten advanced-level ESL learners and a comparison group of native English speakers read a set of simple true or false statements. These were presented in quiet and noisy conditions to 24 native English listeners who assessed their truth value and wrote out the utterances they heard. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects of noise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. In fact, of the set of items that were verified perfectly in the noise-free condition, the Mandarin-accented ones were significantly less well verified in noise than the native English ones were. A large degree of interspeaker variability was also noted, particularly for the Mandarin speakers.

Voice onset time (VOT) was measured in the production of /t/ in the initial position of 60 English words spoken by native English (NE) speakers and native Spanish (NS) speakers who began learning English before or after the age of 21 years. The subjects rated the words for familiarity, age of acquisition, imageability, and relatedness to word(s) in the Spanish lexicon. The subjects in all three groups showed two well-known phonetic effects: They produced longer VOT values in the context of high than nonhigh vowels, and longer VOT in one- than in two-syllable words. As expected, the NS subjects who learned English prior to the age of 21 years judged the English words to be more familiar and more like a Spanish word than did the subjects who began learning English later in life. Also, many but not all of the NS subjects produced /t/ with shorter VOT values than did the NE subjects. However, regression analyses showed that none of the lexical factors mentioned above or the text frequency of the 60 English words examined affected the NS subjects' VOT values. Thus, variation in the accuracy with which NS subjects produce English /t/ must be accounted for by factors other than the lexical status of the words in which /t/ occurs.

In this paper, I address the nature of the mental representation of an interlanguage grammar. The focus will be on the necessity of positing some sort of hierarchical constituent structure to account for L2 phonology. I discuss relevant data from the domains of the acquisition of segments, syllables, moras, and metrical structure. The interaction of these domains is discussed.

In addition, I look at the acquisition of onset clusters and argue that the acquisition of liquids is correlated with the acquisition of consonantal sequences. Evidence from language change, language typology, and language acquisition suggests that there is a causal relationship between the two. The theoretical framework of feature geometry and derived sonority gives us the apparatus to explain what the second-language learners are doing.

This study assessed global foreign accent in sentences and the production of two English consonants, /[upside-down r]/ and /l/, by 11 Japanese college students during their freshman and senior years (T1, T2). In Experiment 1, native English-speaking listeners rated five sentences spoken by the Japanese speakers and five native English control speakers. Experiments 2 and 3 examined 25 word onsets containing /[upside-down r]/ and /l/. Auditory evaluations by native English-speaking listeners were used to determine: (a) to what extent the consonants produced could be identified as intended at T1 and T2; and (b) whether /[upside-down r]/ and /l/ were produced more accurately at T2 than at T1. The results provided little support for a markedness hypothesis based on statistical frequencies and mixed support for a hypothesis based on perception studies. Some speakers made significant improvement, however, in both global foreign accent and liquid identifiability and accuracy.

This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study in interlanguage phonology examining the production of two structures in a markedness relationship, biliteral and triliteral onsets, the latter being more marked than the former. This study specifically tests the Interlanguage Structure Conformity Hypothesis (ISCH) by measuring the acquisition of the onsets in the markedness relationship against a criterion measure of 80% correct production. The subjects were 10 native Spanish speakers enrolled in intermediate courses in a community college. Data were gathered twice over a period of 10 months. Results of the study fail to provide any counterevidence to the ISCH.

This paper discusses the simplification of forms ending in obstruents by native speakers of Mandarin, in particular two effects that are not obviously motivated by either the native- or the target-language grammars: a tendency to devoice final voiced obstruents and a tendency to maximize the number of bisyllabic forms in the output. These patterns are accounted for within Optimality Theory, which describes a grammar as a set of universal, ranked constraints. It is argued that the devoicing and bisyllabicity effects result from universal markedness constraints that are present in all grammars but that are masked in the learner's native-language grammar by the effects of higher ranking constraints.