This paper presents a study of factors affecting judgments of native and non-native accent in German. The data suggest that listener status (native or non-native speakers) and degree of experience with German play a role in the aspects of speech which raters cite as salient. Interestingly, the same descriptive terms used by raters were shown to mean different things for different raters, raising questions about the relationship between perceptions of accents and the ways people describe them, which, in turn, hold implications for language teaching. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure, and 8 footnotes.)