In the Kaken research, it was revealed that raters' first language does not affect the evaluation of Japanese-accented English read speech as far as they have backgrounds of phonetics or L2 pronunciation teaching. The raters were L1 speakers of 1)Japanese (n=4), 2)American English (n=4) and 3)other languages (e.g. German, French, Mandarin, Polish; n=1 each).

    In the current study, we investigated whether the same consistency was observed for L1 speakers of other languages. We originally aimed to recruit Korean and Spanish learners of English but failed to recruit enough number of them. Instead, 27 Japanese learners of English (7 beginner, 12 intermediate and 8 advanced) without phonetic or English teaching backgrounds were recruited and compared to two native speakers of English. They evaluated 183 Japanese learners reading the North Wind and the Sun.

    The results showed that although advanced learners accurately evaluated both segmental and prosodic accuracy of the speech (i.e. consistent with the phoneticians), beginner learners could only tell the accuracy of segments but not prosody. Also, advanced learners focused more on the prosody while native listeners focused more on the segments.