“…For instance, native speakers of Japanese have difficulty distinguishing the English words rocket and locket (Aoyama, Flege, Guion, Akahane-Yamada, & Yamada, 2004), while native speakers of Spanish (Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997) and Portuguese (Bion, Escudero, Rauber, & Baptista, 2006;Rauber, Escudero, Bion, & Baptista, 2005) have difficulty distinguishing the English words beat and bit, and native speakers of Dutch have difficulty with the English words bet and bat (Broersma, 2005;Cutler & Broersma, 2005). A common characteristic among these pairs of words is that they are differentiated by L2 contrasts which do not have immediate counterparts in the learners' native languages.…”