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The article contains some preliminary data of a contrastive study of prosodic phenomena in Dutch and French, and some ideas about implementa-tion of findings in the teaching of French to Dutch learners. First the durational aspects are considered of Dutch as a "stress-timed" language and of French as a "syllable-timed" language.To study the phenomena of "compression" and "reduction" some comparisons are made between the length of unaccented syllables in Dutch and French cognate words.In the second part some intonation contours are compared for words as described by Vaissière for French and by Cohen, 't Hart and Collier for Dutch. Finally some suggestions are made about possible applications to the teaching of French to Dutch learners.