In this pilot study looking at interlanguage prosody, normal, and contrastively focused constructions in English were collected from four English-as-a-first-language speakers and four Japanese-as-a-first-language speakers. These productions were then played to six native English speakers to see how well they could identify the stress placement of the uttterances. The judgements were used as a diagnostic tool to study the salient characteristics of problems in non-native stress productions. It was found that stress placement was easier to recognize in native speaker tokens, although it was not clear what features of stress were most important to the judges. Possible explanations and the directions they suggest for further study in second language prosody are given. (Author)