The objectives of this project were the instrumental analysis and detailed description of the phonetic features of American English and of the foreign languages most commonly taught in the United States--German, Spanish, and French. Eleven prosodic features, 13 vocalic features, and 16 consonant features of each are compared to English. A three-way instrumental technique of research was developed: (1) The spectrograms of utterances that have been composed and recorded for a special purpose were analyzed and those of English compared with the corresponding ones of German, Spanish, and French. This led to hypothesizing about the acoustic differences between English and the other languages regarding certain phonetic characteristics. (2) The hypotheses were verified or refuted by means of spectrographic synthesis. (3) Motion picture X-rays of the utterances were made and studied frame by frame by means of special projectors, to discover the articulatory features that correlated with the acoustic ones found by spectrographic analysis and synthesis. As a complement to this instrumental research, phonetic features of English and foreign languages were investigated by statistical analysis, related to such features as phoneme frequency and distribution and syllable types. "Two notes on Semitic Laryngeals in East Gurage" by R. Hetzron is included. (DO)