Arkadiusz Rojczyk Andrzej Porzuczek Selected aspects in the acquisition of English phonology by Polish learners. Segments and prosody 1. Introduction The acquisition of FL phonology is an integral part of the acquisition of a foreign language in general. It shares many similarities with the acquisition of other language strata, such as morphology, syntax, or semantics. However, unlike those other strata, it involves the most physical aspect of language. It results from the fact that articulation is the final-stage manifestation of mental processes involved in utterance planning. Driven by neural stimulation, articulators engage in sequences of movements in order to produce sounds that will further make up meaningful units such as words. Because of its physicality, FL phonology appears to be unarguably the most challenging element of language learning, very often resulting in the so-called foreign or non-native accent. Even very proficient speakers of FL may have detectable non-native features in their pronunciation. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the 'Joseph Conrad Syndrome'. While Conrad's mastery of English vocabulary and style well exceeded that of typical native speakers, his pronunciation became anecdotal for having a strong Polish accent. The difficulties with attaining native-like accent in FL come as a consequence of different principles governing the phonology of L1 and FL. FL phonetics and phonology research is therefore interested in pinpointing those differences and making predictions about which sounds or groups of sounds will be hard to learn. For example, because Polish lacks dental fricatives // and ð/, it may be predicted, using a contrastive analysis, that Polish learners will find those sounds particularly challenging to learn. The next stage is to verify contrastive predictions in controlled experiments. Using the example of English dental fricatives, if a