From being a relatively neglected area in the study of second language learning, the acquisition of second language speech has emerged over the last decade as an important research field with a wide range of approaches; the traditions of articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguists investigation contribute a rare interdisdplinarity to this area of linguistic inquiry. Current scholarly interest augurs well for future theoretical advances.

This investigation of NS–NNS interaction in same- and cross-gender dyads on four information exchange tasks revealed that male and female NNSs made and received a comparable number of opportunities to request L2 input and modify interlanguage output during interaction with female NSs, but during interaction with male NSs, these opportunities were significantly lower for female than for male NNSs. In addition, more request-response exchanges were found on tasks in which either the NS or the NNS was given initial control over task-related information. Findings of the study were attributed to cultural similarities and differences in the interactional behaviors of the participants.

This study is a partial replication and extension of Eckman's (1981a) study on the production of English word-final voiced obstruents by native speakers of Japanese and Cantonese, in which he reported evidence of an interlanguage rule of schwa paragoge for Japanese speakers and one of terminal devoicing for Cantonese speakers. In the current study, data from subjects performing three tasks varying in the speech style elicited were compared to the broad transcription of English and to data from a comparison group of native speakers of English performing the same tasks. The inclusion of native speaker data allowed the identification of variants in non-native production as either interlanguage phenomena or native-like simplified or assimilated forms. Results showed that devoicing was significant for the Japanese subjects, as well as for the Cantonese subjects. In addition, the Japanese subjects approximated target variants significantly more often than the Cantonese subjects, raising questions about the sources of the variants observed.