Practice in lexical stress often includes exercises in recognizing and producing weak syllables (Dalton & Seidlhofer 1994, pp. 99–100). In the present study, both NLs and NNLs had little difficulty in identifying items where weak vowels had been replaced by full ones. This finding suggests that weak quality does not provide an important part of the access information that is used when recognizing content words and that it does not contribute importantly to intelligibility. One can conclude that practicing weak quality syllables need not be a priority for the pronunciation teacher. This precept, however, specifically concerns weak syllables that are part of larger content words; it should not be extended to function words, which were not part of the study. It seems likely that the weak quality of many functors provides an important cue that distinguishes them from content words and thus contributes importantly