This paper reports on a study in which twenty young adults were tested for their ability to accurately reproduce the articulatory and prosodic features of three non-Indo-European languages in which they had received instruction. The first of two basic goals of this research was to test, at the purely phonetic level, the "critical period for language learning" hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967). The second problem was to see if students could acquire the linguistic features associated with "language accent" with no reference to grammar or lexical meaning. Both questions are considered, with special attention to the concrete results of the study and to their implications. The final section of the paper includes a discussion of the acoustic image imprinting theory, which is the basis for the method used to teach phonetic material in this experiment. (Author)