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.