The intonational accent is aligned to this penultimate stress, as we observe in our data. The Javanese speaker, however, does not seem to use a rule governed stress pattern. He even varies stress patterns within words. The Javanese speaker probably misses the internalised rules necessary to produce consistent stress patterns. Thus, his Javanese as well as his Indonesian will show free stress.
Any stress position is valid as long as there is some accent at the right edge of the phrase.
The invariant stressing of the Toba Batak speaker is as acceptable as the highly variable stress of the Javanese. According to our perception the pitch movement can be aligned to any syllable for the Javanese speaker. However, as stipulated in the introduction, it is the perception of the native speaker that matters. If Indonesian listeners demand the accent to fall on the penult, this position may be metrically strong after all. We predict, however, that all positions will be acceptable, though the penult may be slightly preferred.