SUMMARY
In this paper, the acoustic facts of Voice Onset Time (VOT) are exemplified by looking at two virtually different languages in terms of recognizing VOT as a distinctive phonological parameter. Selected tokens of Serbian and Serbian English are recorded in carrier sentences and analysed acoustically, as spoken by four proficient Serbian speakers of EFL. The results show that, although Serbian does not recognize VOT as a parameter creating phonological distinctions, advanced non-native speakers of English are capable of learning how to relate the oral and laryngeal gestures in order to produce more native-like pronunciations of English voiceless stops in the phonetic contexts where English /p t k/ are expected to have a long lag. Special attention is drawn to CV sequences whose VOT values deviate in the two languages, as well as to those where VOTs are similar, which can be used to raise the awareness of this phonetic phenomenon in a Serbian EFL learner.