Are Indonesians sensitive to contrastive accentuation below the word level?

Abstract

It is impossible in Indonesian to express narrow-focus meta-linguistic contrasts on subparts of words (whether meaningless syllables or meaningful morphemes). In English and Dutch this possibility exists, as in I meant coffin not coffer or I said meaningful not meaningless. We predict from this circumstance that Indonesian learners of Dutch will not be sensitive to this type of prosodic contrast marking at the sub-word level. Native Dutch speakers should be able to make functional use of this type of contrast. We conducted an experiment with thirteen Indonesian learners of Dutch with lengths of residence in the Netherlands between 3 weeks and 27 years, and a group of thirteen native Dutch speakers as controls. The results show that the Indonesian learners perform at chance level, and are therefore insensitive to narrow-focus contrasts below the word level. Dutch learners are highly sensitive to these contrasts on average, although three out of thirteen performed at chance level. We argue from these results that Indonesian has no word stress.

No stress, no pitch accent, no prosodic focus: the case of Ambonese Malay

“…(Overall, only 71% of words indicated as 'prominent' had some F0 feature making it stand out from level pitch.) Significantly, Indonesian listeners appear to be largely insensitive to differences in the peak location in Indonesian (van Zanten & van Heuven 1998: 141) or Dutch (van Heuven & Faust 2009) words. Although the task using Dutch words addressed the perception of focus, which may be a skill that is independent of the perception of stress location ( §3), these behavioural data do not support the notion of word-based stress that is marked with a pitch accent.…”

Lexical and Post-Lexical Prosodic Documentation of Embaloh Language

“…In the tone language, there is no difference in prominence associated with the syllables that make up the word, while stress is a culminating property: only one syllable is the strongest. A language can be a tone or a stressed language, but it cannot be both except for certain languages because of language contact (van Heuven, 2018;van Heuven & Faust, 2009).…”