It is impossible in Indonesian to express narrow-focus meta-linguistic contrastson 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 saidmeaningful not meaningless. We predict from this circumstance that Indonesianlearners of Dutch will not be sensitive to this type of prosodic contrast marking atthe sub-word level. Native Dutch speakers should be able to make functional useof this type of contrast. We conducted an experiment with thirteen Indonesianlearners of Dutch with lengths of residence in the Netherlands between 3weeks 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 aretherefore insensitive to narrow-focus contrasts below the word level. Dutchlearners are highly sensitive to these contrasts on average, although three out ofthirteen performed at chance level. We argue from these results that Indonesianhas no word stress.