This study investigates how spatial configurations of English fricatives change for Japanese learners in advanced, intermediate and pre-intermediate levels, in comparison to that of native speakers. The perceptual representations obtained from Multidimensional Scaling analysis on similarity judgements showed clear sibilance/nonsibilance division for advanced and intermediate learners, but place of articulation feature was not observed. The perceptual configuration of pre-intermediate level students showed strong L1 phonological influence. The results show that the spatial modelling of similarity data can provide an alternative to the conventional approaches to cross language perception.