This study examines the acquisition of French intonational rises by adult native speakers of American English. Production data were gathered using a discourse completion task and a storytelling task from eight American college students beginning a semester-long study abroad program in Southern France. Results suggest that speakers struggled with two particular aspects of French intonation: the grouping of words into Accentual Phrases, and the phonetic realization of phrase-final rises. In particular, the probability distribution for the alignment of the late L elbow was bimodal for L2 speakers but unimodal for L1 speakers, suggesting the use in the learner speech of two distinct tonal patterns instead of the single French LH*. Mean values for overall pitch range and the scaling of continuative rises were significantly lower and less variable than French L1 values as well.