Аннотация:The chapter addresses one of the controversial issues in second language pronunciation assessment: why raters give different ratings even if the scoring procedure is valid and the criteria are consistent. The research aimed at tackling the question with the help of neuroaesthetic methodology. The Vienna Integrated Model of top-down and bottom-up processes in Art Perception allows the experimental ratings to be analysed from the rater’s perspective and the speech sample to be compared with an art object as far as its evaluation is concerned. The experimental material consisted of a student’s speech sample, which was a part of a vast annotated data set (collected over a four-year teaching period), the student's pronunciation ratings and a pilot survey of various raters with their assessment strategies. The results of the academic assessment of the student’s phonetic performance and the analysis of the survey answers correlated well with the neuroaesthetic model. The correlation covered the main processing elements: (1) pre-classification; (2) perceptual analysis; (3) implicit memory integration; (4) explicit classification; (5) cognitive mastery; (6) secondary control and (7) self-awareness, metacognitive assessment.