Deaccentuation in Dutch as a second language ; Where does the accent go to?

A non-native accent in a second language is usually not restricted to the segmental domain — consonants and vowels — but is also noticeable in the suprasegmental domain, which includes phenomena such as word stress and sentence accent. The central question in this paper is whether advanced non-native speakers of Dutch produce pitch accent errors as a result of deaccentuation of given information in ‘verum focus’ sentences (‘… but I don’t READ books ’). We expected the correct position of the pitch accent to be problematic for speakers with a non-Germanic mother tongue (L1) as compared to speak... Mehr ...