Dr. YANG YikeZou, YueYueZouHan, DongDongHan2025-07-242025-07-242024Yang, Y., Zou, Y., & Han, D. (8 December 2024). Acoustic correlates of accentedness and comprehensibility in checked syllables of L2 Cantonese by Mandarin learners. 2024 Annual Research Forum of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Shue Yan University.https://lshk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/ARF2024-abstract-book.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24057Purpose: One distinctive feature of Cantonese is its checked syllables, which are closed syllables ending with voiceless plosives /-p/, /-t/ or /-k/ (Wong & Chan, 2018). Among the literature on second language (L2) Cantonese speech learning, little attention has focused on these checked syllables. This study aimed to address this gap by investigating the acoustic correlates of accentedness and comprehensibility judgements in L2 Cantonese checked syllables produced by Mandarin-speaking learners. Lacking checked syllables, Mandarin presents a unique linguistic contrast, making this an ideal case to examine the acquisition of Cantonese checked syllables. Methods: Forty Mandarin-speaking learners of Cantonese (17 males and 23 females; aged: 29.81 ± 5.77) were invited to record the numbers from zero to ten in a speech production experiment. One clearly pronounced token for each of the four checked syllables, ‘six luk6’, ‘seven cat1’, ‘eight baat3’, ‘ten sap6’ was manually extracted from the recording of each speaker. These 160 tokens (4 syllables x 40 speakers) were normalised for intensity and included as the stimuli in this study. Thirty-two native Cantonese speakers (9 males and 23 females; aged: 20.27 ± 2.29), all novice listeners (Suzuki & Kormos, 2020), were recruited to rate the accentedness and comprehensibility of each trial on 9-point Likert scales. Following previous research (Chai & Ye, 2022; Oakden, 2017; Yu et al., 2022), this study measured vowel quality (frequencies of the first and second formants, F1 and F2), pitch contours (discrete cosine transform values, DCT1, DCT2 and DCT3), duration and voice quality (jitter). Generalised additive models (GAMs) were constructed to examine how the acoustic cues explained the perceived accentedness and comprehensibility by native listeners. Summary of findings: For each rater, the correlation coefficients between accentedness and comprehensibility ratings ranged from 0.445 to 0.953 (ps < 0.001). The GAM models showed that all the seven acoustic cues had significant effects for perceived accentedness and comprehensibility for the syllables ‘six luk6’ and ‘ten sap6’, suggesting that all these cues might have contributed to the judgement for Tone 6, the low-level tone. For the syllable ‘seven cat1’, all seven cues were effective for accentedness ratings, and six out of seven cues (all but duration) were effective for comprehensibility ratings. For the syllable ‘eight baat3’, only five cues had significant effects for accentedness and four had significant effects for comprehensibility, revealing a more complex picture for this syllable, which might have been caused by its vowel length as Mandarin does not have long vowels. Overall, F2, DCT2 and jitter seemed to be reliable cues for predicting the ratings as they were effective in all the eight models. The results reveal acoustic correlates influencing native speaker judgments, offering valuable insights for developing training paradigms to enhance L2 Cantonese speech.enConference Paper