In English and Japanese, the information-structural notion of contrastive focus can be realized through acoustic prominence, but the way it is marked is language-dependent [1,2]. While contrastive focus is marked with a bitonal pitch accent (L+H*) in English [1], in Japanese accent carries lexical information and is not used to convey discourse information [3-5]. Furthermore, while stressed-syllables in English are lengthened under prominence [6], Japanese is a mora-timed language and the duration of syllables is less flexible [7]. The present study investigates the degree in which L2 learners are able to perceive contrastive focus, or other prosodically conveyed information, for prosodically different languages such as English and Japanese. [8] examined acquisition of prominence and boundary perception in English by Japanese EFL learners and found that learners are much poorer at perceiving prominences and boundaries than native speakers in spontaneous speech [6], although it wasn’t clear why; Fleiss’ kappa on inter-speaker agreement for prominences was 0.402 (English L1) > 0.305 (Advanced JEFL) > 0.284 (Intermediate JEFL), and for boundaries was 0.63 (English L1) > 0.521 (Advanced JEFL) > 0.458 (Intermediate JEFL). In a study on L1 production and perception, [9] found that for languages with stronger acoustic marking of contrastive focus, listeners were able to identify the focused material with almost perfect accuracy (97.3% for English). On the other hand, in languages with weaker marking of contrastive focus, listeners were able to identify the contrastive word above chance but at very low accuracy rates (44.6% for Seoul Korean). In their analysis, Japanese fell into this second group but was not included in the perception portion of the study. Taken together, do Japanese speakers have difficulty with hearing prominence in English [8] because acoustics prominence is not as saliently marked in Japanese [9]? In the present study, following the methodology used in [9], one male speaker of Midwest American English and one male speaker of Tokyo Japanese recorded a series of ten question-answer pairs which contained a ten digit number of the form XXX-XXX-XXXX. In each of the responses one of the ten numbers was produced with contrastive focus. 22 intermediate to advanced EFL students between the ages of 18 and 24 were recruited for the L1 experiment and 18 for the L2, at two Japanese universities. In the experiment, subjects listened to each recording and marked on a transcript, the word that they heard as contrastive. They listened to each recording once. The stimuli responses are summarized in Figure 1, which shows that Japanese speakers are able to perceive contrastive focus with high accuracy in both their L1 (86.2% for Japanese) and their L2 (98.6% for English). An acoustic analysis shows that contrastive focus correlates most strongly with the rms intensity of the word in Japanese and the mean F0 of the word in English. Thus, we found that contrastive focus was marked in our Japanese and English utterances and that the participants were conscious of the cues marking contrast in both languages. The high accuracy obtained under the native Japanese speech is counter to the expectations made in [9] and it is not clear how to reconcile this difference. Similarly, [8] would not have predicted such high accuracy with the non-native speech perception task, although there are several possible reasons for this result. While [8] involved perception of holistic prominence over spontaneous speech, the task in the present study is much simpler as it involves a specific type of prominence using read speech and shorter speech segments. It may be conjectured that the degraded accuracy in positions 7 and 10 (Fig. 1) for Japanese can be accounted for in terms of interactions of degrees of pitch downtrend at the end of an utterance and lowering at the beginning and end of an accentual phrase [3], but more experimental work is needed to confirm this. No matter how the facts are accounted for, this study has shown that L2 prosody is not as simple a mechanism as it was believed. Learners may have enough ability to hear contrasts in L2 in its simplest form, but, given contexts as in [8], they will get confused.