This study examines orthography as one source of non-targetlike phonetic output and focuses on the acquisition by speakers of American English vowel reduction in Russian, a salient feature of the Russian phonetic system that is not reflected in the graphics of the Cyrillic script. The researchers conducted a structured interview and administered reading, arithmetic, and listing-from-memory tasks that included the same lexical items as those elicited in the interview. The following conclusions were drawn from the data: (1) a non-targetlike pattern of vowel reduction can be attributed to the influence of the graphic representations of lexical units; (2) native-speaker-non-native speaker interaction influences phonetic accuracy; and (3) the pattern of vowel reduction for highly familiar words remains constant across various tasks. (Author/JL)