At the beginning of this article we posed several questions that we felt had not been sufficiently addressed by previous research: What is the proper balance between segmentals and suprasegmentals in pronuncia- tion pedagogy? What defines comprehensible pronunciation and the pronunciation threshold? What are the pedagogical priorities for teachers of pronunciation? We have attempted to address these questions by considering a series of studies (Riney & Flege, 1998; Riney & Takagi, 1999; and the current study) that have focused on different aspects of the pronunciation of the same 11 Japanese EFL speakers over a 42- month interval. Although we did not directly address comprehensible pronunciation because we were aware of no established measure for it, we consider it likely that the substitution of oneJapanese sound ( [r] ) for two contrasting English sounds (/J/ and /1/) contributes to low comprehensibility and increased ambiguity of speech. It is the responsibility of pronunciation instruction to try to minimize this. At a segmental level, at the very least, EFL speakers should be able to make a distinction between two separate phonemes instead of substituting one LI phoneme for both L2 phonemes.