This study investigates the perceptual relevance of vowel duration and pitchmovement alignment to lexical tone identification in the Dutch-Limburgdialect of Weert. For this purpose a perception experiment was carried out inwhich listeners identified a series of experimental stimuli differing in vowelduration and tonal alignment as instances of the grammatical categories 'singular'or 'plural'. The results of this experiment suggest that native speakers ofthe Weert dialect are most sensitive to vowel duration differences. Only whenvowel duration is ambiguous, tonal alignment enables them to disambiguatethe stimuli. This supports the tonal re-interpretion hypothesis in terms ofvowel duration.
