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

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

Voice onset time (VOT) was measured in the production of /t/ in the initial positionof 60 English words spoken by native English (NE) speakers and native Spanish (NS) speakerswho began learning English before or after the age of 21 years. The subjects rated the words forfamiliarity, 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 longerVOT values in the context of high than nonhigh vowels, and longer VOT in one- than intwo-syllable words. As expected, the NS subjects who learned English prior to the age of 21years judged the English words to be more familiar and more like a Spanish word than did thesubjects who began learning English later in life. Also, many but not all of the NS subjectsproduced /t/ with shorter VOT values than did the NE subjects. However, regressionanalyses showed that none of the lexical factors mentioned above or the text frequency of the 60English words examined affected the NS subjects' VOT values. Thus, variation in theaccuracy with which NS subjects produce English /t/ must be accounted for by factorsother 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 toaccount for L2 phonology. I discuss relevant data from the domains of the acquisition ofsegments, syllables, moras, and metrical structure. The interaction of these domains isdiscussed.

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

This study assessed global foreign accent in sentences and the production of two Englishconsonants, /[upside-down r]/ and /l/, by 11 Japanese college students duringtheir freshman and senior years (T1, T2). In Experiment 1, native English-speaking listenersrated 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 thanat T1. The results provided little support for a markedness hypothesis based on statisticalfrequencies and mixed support for a hypothesis based on perception studies. Some speakersmade significant improvement, however, in both global foreign accent and liquid identifiabilityand accuracy.

This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study in interlanguage phonologyexamining the production of two structures in a markedness relationship, biliteral and triliteralonsets, the latter being more marked than the former. This study specifically tests theInterlanguage Structure Conformity Hypothesis (ISCH) by measuring the acquisition of theonsets in the markedness relationship against a criterion measure of 80% correct production. Thesubjects were 10 native Spanish speakers enrolled in intermediate courses in a communitycollege. Data were gathered twice over a period of 10 months. Results of the study fail to provideany counterevidence to the ISCH.

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