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Tonal and prosodic aspects of Cantonese spoken by mandarin-speaking immigrants in Hong Kong
Author(s)
Date Issued
2023
Conference
Citation
Yang, Yike (2023 June 10). Tonal and prosodic aspects of Cantonese spoken by mandarin-speaking immigrants in Hong Kong. Focal – Forum On Cantonese Linguistics, Room 3301/3401, 3/F, Academic Building (Lift 2), HKUST.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
This talk will report two studies that investigated the tonal and prosodic aspect of Cantonese spoken by Mandarin-speaking immigrants in Hong Kong. Study 1 attempted to explore whether Mandarin-speaking immigrants could acquire the Cantonese
tonal system and whether there would be category assimilation or dissimilation of lexical tones in their second language (L2) Cantonese. A tone production experiment involving 41 participants was conducted (32 immigrants and 9 native speakers), and both acoustic and perceptual measurements were employed to analyse the speech samples. The immigrants showed a smaller tonal space in comparison with the native speakers; they also had very low accuracy rates in their tone production, indicating that they had not fully acquired the Cantonese tonal system. Explanations for the confusion patterns are provided, and the effects of the first language on L2 tone acquisition are discussed. Study 2 consisted of a production experiment and a perception one with Mandarin-speaking immigrants and native speakers of Cantonese. The focus production experiment elicited various types of focus in Cantonese, the data from which showed that the immigrants made more use of acoustic cues (such as fundamental frequency) to mark focus than the native speakers. In the focus
perception experiment, the participants were tested on whether they were able to map acoustic cues onto focus and whether they were able to map focus onto acoustic cues. The immigrants performed better than the Cantonese speakers across focus pairs, although both groups of participants exhibited similar patterns in the perception experiment. The immigrants’ superior performance might have been due to the fact that the immigrants had learned to use F0 and duration in their first language (L1) Mandarin and L2 Cantonese, respectively, and were thus better at distinguishing the acoustic details than the native speakers of Cantonese.
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