Contrasting Sounds: A Phonological Analysis of English Consonants Produced by Arabic ESL Speakers Salim. Masood Nassery smasudn@gmail.com 1. Introduction The ultimate goal of most second or EFL leaners is to attain native like fluency in order to be indistinguishable from native language speakers. However, this dream has remained dream and has not come true especially in area of pronunciation. In this regard, Wong (1987) argued that pronunciation is not merely a linguistic matter, but social one as well. That is, various factors such as age, exposure to target language, and the role of first language interferences should be taken into account when exploring this issue. In this regard, Lenneberg (1967) proposed the critical period hypothesis (CPH) in which he suggested that there is a particular period of time when language could be more acquired successfully than any other time in oŶe’s life. This hypothesis had been further investigated and confirmed by many linguists e.g. Chiswick & Miller (2007) and Newport (1989). Another factor that is the concern of this study is the influence of mother language on the second language acquisition. In this regard, Cook (1992) argued that L1 linguistic system is connected in all sort of ways to the L2 knowledge being under acquisition. That is, if speaker of any language wish to acquire any particular new language in this world, he or she would certainly depend on the linguistic system of their mother tongue in a process called language interference. Avery and Ehrlich (1992) argued that learners transfer their L1 sound pattern into second language and this transfer is likely to cause a foreign accents which in turn cause a mispronunciation in vowels and consonants production.