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.

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This article investigates the relationship between global foreign accent and a more discrete feature of pronunciation-the substitution of the Japanese flap ([ɾ]) for English liquids (/ɹ/ and /l/). The percentages of Japanese flap substitutions by 11 Japanese students during their first and fourth years of college were calculated for target /ɹ/ versus /l/, in reading versus spontaneous tasks, and for word-initial singleton (#_V) versus word-initial cluster (#[C]C_V) environments. The number of observations for each speaker ranged from 276 to 318, and individuals' percentages of flap substitutions ranged from 0.4% to 77.8% for all attempts at English liquids. The principal finding was a strong negative correlation (r = Ϫ0.805) between percentages of Japanese flap substitution and accent ratings. Furthermore, flaps occurred more often for /l/ than for /ɹ/, more often for singleton liquids than for liquids in clusters, and more often in spontaneous than in reading tasks. The discussion addresses debate over teaching segmentals versus suprasegmentals and related pedagogical priorities.

This study follows R. C. Major (1987) and J. E. Flege and W. Eefting (1987a) in its investigation of the correlation between global foreign accent (GFA) and voice onset time (VOT). VOT values for /p/, /t/, and /k/ were measured at 2 times, separated by an interval of 42 months, produced by 11 Japanese speakers of English as a foreign language; 5 age-matched native speakers of English served as the control group. The GFA scores of the same 16 speakers are taken from T. J. Riney and J. E. Flege (1998). One finding, that VOT generally did not change over time, is attributed to phonological similarity between Japanese and English diaphones. A second finding, that of a GFA-VOT correlation, links global and discrete measures of accent and supports an earlier claim by R. C. Major (1987).

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