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 Hiligsmann Jansen, et al., 2023). However, the influence of musical training on prosody production has not yet been investigated on this target group (Rasier 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.