For speakers of non-stress languages, the correct pronunciation of word stress in stress languages is often problematic. For instance, Indonesians who speak Dutch quite fluently may still have difficulties in putting the stress in the correct position in this language. Apart from choosing the right stress pattern, pronouncing the stresses/accents in the correct 'Dutch' way is another difficulty.

Little research has been done on the melodic aspects of non-stress languages. Studying the prosodies (intonation, rhythm, loudness) of these languages and comparing them to the comparatively well-studied prosodies of Western languages will enhance prosodic studies in general; it will also be useful for second-language learning.

Our research investigates stress/accent realization of Jakarta Malay. Secondly, we investigate to what extent native speakers of Jakarta Malay are influenced by their native language when they are speaking Dutch. In this talk, I will try to answer two questions:

1.	To what extent is the way in which native speakers of Jakarta Malay realize Dutch stress, acceptable to Dutch listeners?
2.	To what extent are Indonesian and Dutch listeners able to identify the language background of Dutch-speaking Jakartans using prosodic information only?

To answer these questions I will report on two perception experiments. In these experiments, the data of the (non-stress) Jakarta Malay speakers are compared with data of two languages that do have (contrastive) stress, i.e. Dutch and Toba Batak.

Preliminary results indicate that the stress realizations of Jakarta Malay speakers are less acceptable to Dutch listeners than those of Toba Batak speakers. Toba Batak speakers apparently are more successful in pronouncing Dutch stresses than speakers of Jakarta Malay are. We assume that the Toba Batak speakers, as native speakers of a (contrastive) stress language, are at an advantage here over Jakarta Malay speakers, who do not have word stress in their native language.