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.