Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian (2001). A robust method to study stress 
'deafness'. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110, 1606-1618.

Previous research by Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián-Gallés, and Mehler [Journal of 
Memory and Language 36, 406-421 (1997)] has shown that French participants, as 
opposed to Spanish participants, have difficulties in distinguishing non-words 
that differ only in the location of stress. Contrary to Spanish, French does not
have contrastive stress, and French participants are ‘deaf’ to stress contrasts. 
The experimental paradigm used by Dupoux et al. (speeded ABX) yielded 
significant group differences, but did not allow for a sorting of individuals 
according to their stress ‘deafness’. Individual assessment is crucial to study 
special populations, such as bilinguals or trained monolinguals. In this paper, a
more robust paradigm based on a short term memory sequence repetition task is 
proposed. In five French-Spanish cross-linguistic experiments, stress ‘deafness’
is shown to crucially depend upon a combination of memory load and phonetic 
variability in F0. In Experiments 3 and 4, non-overlapping distribution of
individual results for French and Spanish participants is observed. The paradigm
is thus appropriate for assessing stress ‘deafness’ in individual participants.