Under the so-called culminative definition of stress, present-day linguists hold the view that within one word or larger domain only one syllable can bear the stress. This is in contrast with the classical (British-English) phonetic tradition which allows the occurrence of two strong stresses within certain words, which are then called ‘double-stressed’. Moreover, precisely the class of double-stressed words was said to be subject to rhythmic variation (or ‘stress clash’). The present paper purports to find acoustic and perceptual evi’dence that may allow us to choose between these competing proposals, comparing the behaviour of Dutch adjectives with canonically rising, falling, and double-stress patterns, in spoken contexts that should bear out the predicted rhythmic changes in double-stressed words. Our results argue against a strictly culminative definition of stress.