Musicians vs. non-musicians: who produces sentence stress better? Analysis of fundamental frequency and syllable duration in a negative sentence among French-speaking learners of Dutch
(2025) Dag van de Fonetiek — Location: Utrecht (31.October.2025)
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- French-speaking learners face significant challenges in acquiring Dutch prosody due to fundamental prosodic differences between the two languages. Dutch features, among others, a sentence stress (SS), which serves a contrastive or focus function to emphasize new or contrasted information (Rietveld & Van Heuven, 2016). This SS is produced by an increase of the fundamental frequency in more than 4 semitones, a 10% to 15% longer syllable duration and a greater intensity (Van Heuven, 2018). In contrast, French uses fixed final stress at the end of words and phrases (Di Cristo, 2000) that fulfills a demarcative function. Because of this prosodic difference, French-speaking learners of Dutch often take stress patterns over from their native language. In a negative sentence, they therefore tend to emphasise the negation (at the end of the sentence), whereas the verb form should be stressed (e.g., *Ik weet het niet instead of Ik weet het niet, ‘I don’t know’; Hiligsmann & Rasier, 2007). Besides, musical training appears to enhance language skills, particularly prosody perception (Degrave, 2022; Jansen, et al., 2023). However, the influence of musical training on prosody production has not yet been investigated on this target group (Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2007). The current study therefore analyses whether French-speaking musicians produce SS acoustically better than non-musicians in the negative sentence Ik weet het niet ‘I don't know’. 18 musicians and 17 non-musicians pronounced this sentence twice and were recorded as part of a broader study focussing on their SS production (Dejans & Degrave, 2022; Degrave & De Wispelaere, 2025). The results show that musicians do not pronounce acoustically better than non-musicians. The latter make a slightly better use of fundamental frequency, but both groups seem to produce a longer syllable duration on the negation. These results provide more insight into the prosody acquisition of a foreign language and the link with music. References: Rietveld, T., & Van Heuven, V. (2016). Algemene fonetiek. Coutinho. Van Heuven, V. (2018). Acoustic Correlates and Perceptual Cues of Word and Sentence Stress. Towards a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. In R. Goedemans, J. Heinz, & H. van der Hulst, The Study of Word Stress and Accent. Theories, Methods and Data. (pp. 15-59). Cambridge University Press. Di Cristo, A. (2000). Vers une modélisation de l’accentuation du français [2nd part]. Journal of French Language Studies, 10(1), 27-44. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269500000120. Hiligsmann, P., & Rasier, L. (2007). Uitspraakleer Nederlands voor Franstaligen. Plantyn. Degrave, P. (2022). Music training and the use of songs or rhythm: Do they help for lexical stress processing? International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 60 (3), 799-824. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2019-0081. Jansen, N., Harding, E. E., Loerts, H., Başkent, D., & Lowie, W. (2023). The relation between musical abilities and speech prosody perception: A meta-analysis. Journal of Phonetics, 101, 101278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101278. Rasier, L., & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues. Cahiers de Linguistique Française, 28, 41-66. Dejans, L., & Degrave, P. (2022). Do musicians outperform non-musicians in foreign language prosody production? SysMys’22. Degrave, P., & De Wispelaere, T. (2025). Sentence stress production of French speakers in Dutch: does a musical training help? EuroSLA34.
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De Wispelaere, T., & Degrave, P. (2025). Musicians vs. non-musicians: who produces sentence stress better? Analysis of fundamental frequency and syllable duration in a negative sentence among French-speaking learners of Dutch. Dag van de Fonetiek, Utrecht. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271172