This instrumental study of the phonetic contrast between English /ptk/ and /bdg/ produced by Saudi Arabians reveals that native‐language phonetic norms may carry over to production of target‐language sounds. Despite the existence of phonetic interference, however, the present cross‐sectional study suggests that Saudi learners gradually approximate the phonetic norms of English, at least insofar as several temporal acoustic correlates of stop voicing are concerned. The Saudis' English speech, although not typically Arabic or English in phonetic terms, seems to be the product of a fairly stable interlanguage phonetic system which admits the possibility of phonetic strategies by individual spe