2025P 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

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.

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