A Tale of Two Features: Perception of Cantonese Lexical Tone and English Lexical Stress in Cantonese-English Bilinguals

© 2015 Tong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This study investigated the similarities and differences in perception of Cantonese tones and English stress patterns by Cantonese-English bilingual children, adults, and English monolingual adults. All three groups were asked to discriminate pairs of syllables that minimally differed in either Cantonese tone or in English stress. Bilingual children's performance on tone perception was comparable to their performance on stress perception. By contrast, bilingual adults' performance on tone perception was lower than their performance on stress perception, and there was a similar pattern in English monolingual adults. Bilingual adults tended to perform better than English monolingual adults on both the tone and stress perception tests. A significant correlation between tone perception and stress perception performance was found in bilingual children but not in bilingual adults. All three groups showed lower accuracy in the high rising-low rising contrast than any of the other 14 Cantonese tone contrasts. The acoustic analyses revealed that average F0, F0 onset, and F0 major slope were the critical acoustic correlates of Cantonese tones, whereas multiple acoustic correlates were salient in English stress, including average F0, spectral balance, duration and intensity. We argue that participants' difficulty in perceiving high rising-low rising contrasts originated from the contrasts' similarities in F0 onset and average F0; indeed the difference between their major slopes was the only cue with which to distinguish them. Acoustic-perceptual correlation analyses showed that although the average F0 and F0 onset were associated with tone perception performance in all three groups, F0 major slope was only associated with tone perception in the bilingual adult group. These results support a dynamic interactive account of suprasegmental speech perception by emphasizing the positive prosodic transfer between Cantonese tone and English stress, and the role that level of bilingual language experience and age play in shaping suprasegmental speech perception.published_or_final_versio

Development and validation of a comprehensive assessment questionnaire for Cantonese alaryngeal speakers' speech performance

The study devised and validated the perceptual assessment questionnaire for evaluating the speech performance of Cantonese alaryngeal speakers. Forty-eight male alaryngeal speakers participated in the study: 10 electrolaryngeal, 10 esophageal, 9 tracheoesophageal, 9 pneumatic artificial and 10 normal laryngeal speakers. Five speech therapists also participated in the perceptual rating procedures. Results indicated moderate to strong inter-rater reliability in all parameters that involve only auditory judgment except that of rating electrolarynx noise. Assessment parameters that require both auditory and visual judgment might require further modification. For tone perception, moderate to strong inter-rater reliability was also noted. High intra-rater reliability of the assessment questionnaire was also found. In addition, the parameters adopted were reported to have significant correlation with the acoustic correlates except that for pitch rating. The assessment questionnaire suggested appeared to be valid for evaluating auditory dependent speech characteristics of the four types of alaryngeal speech.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Neural correlates of indicators of sound change in Cantonese: evidence from cortical and subcortical processes

Across time, languages undergo changes in phonetic, syntactic and semantic dimensions. Social, cognitive and cultural factors contribute to sound change, a phenomenon in which the phonetics of a language undergo changes over time. Individuals who misperceive and produce speech in a slightly divergent manner (called innovators) contribute to variability in the society, eventually leading to sound change. However, the cause of variability in these individuals is still unknown. In this study, we examined whether such misperceptions are represented in neural processes of the auditory system. We investigated behavioral, subcortical (via FFR), and cortical (via P300) manifestations of sound change processing in Cantonese, a Chinese language in which several lexical tones are merging. Across the merging categories, we observed a similar gradation of speech perception abilities in both behavior and the brain (subcortical and cortical processes). Further, we also found that behavioral evidence of tone merging correlated with subjects’ encoding at the subcortical and cortical levels. These findings indicate that tone-merger categories, that are indicators of sound change in Cantonese, are represented neurophysiologically with high fidelity. Using our results, we speculate that innovators encode speech in a slightly deviant neurophysiological manner, and thus produce speech divergently that eventually spreads across the community and contributes to sound change

Individual differences in processing pitch contour and rise time in adults: A behavioral and electrophysiological study of Cantonese tone merging

One way to understand the relationship between speech perception and production is to examine cases where the two dissociate. This study investigates the hypothesis that perceptual acuity reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs) to rise time of sound amplitude envelope and pitch contour (reflected in the mismatch negativity, MMN) may associate with individual differences in production among speakers with otherwise comparable perceptual abilities. To test this hypothesis, we took advantage of an on-going sound change – tone merging in Cantonese, and compared the ERPs between two groups of typically-developed native speakers who could discriminate the high rising and low rising tones with equivalent accuracy but differed in the distinctiveness of their production of these tones. Using a passive oddball paradigm, early positive-going EEG components to rise time and MMN to pitch contour were elicited during perception of the two tones. Significant group differences were found in neural responses to rise time rather than pitch contour. More importantly, individual differences in efficiency of tone discrimination in response latency and magnitude of neural responses to rise time were correlated with acoustic measures of F0 offset and rise time differences in productions of the two rising tones.published_or_final_versio

Better than native: Tone language experience enhances English lexical stress discrimination in Cantonese-English bilingual listeners

Available online 13 April 2019While many second language (L2) listeners are known to struggle when discriminating non-native features absent in their first language (L1), no study has reported that L2 listeners perform better than native listeners in this regard. The present study tested whether Cantonese-English bilinguals were better in discriminating English lexical stress in individual words or pseudowords than native English listeners, even though lexical stress is absent in Cantonese. In experiments manipulating acoustic, phonotactic, and lexical cues, Cantonese-English bilingual adults exhibited superior performance in discriminating English lexical stress than native English listeners across all phonotactic/lexical conditions when the fundamental frequency (f0) cue to lexical stress was present. The findings underscore the facilitative effect of Cantonese tone language experience on English lexical stress discrimination.This article is, in part, based on the fourth chapter of the PhD thesis submitted by William Choi to The University of Hong Kong. This research was supported, in part, by the Language Learning Dissertation Grant from Language Learning to William Choi. It was also supported by the Pilot Scheme on International Experiences for Research Postgraduate Students from The University of Hong Kong to William Choi, and the Early Career Scheme (27402514), General Research Fund (17673216), and General Research Fund (17609518) from the HKSAR Research Grant Council to Xiuli Tong. Support was also provided by Ministerio de Ciencia E Innovacion, Grant PSI2014-53277, Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa, Grant SEV-2015-0490, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant IBSS-1519908 to Arthur Samuel. We thank Benjamin Munson for his useful suggestion about the syllable-timed nature of Cantonese and the four anonymous reviewers for comments that have helped us to develop our ideas and presentation more clearly

Tone production using inspiratory phonation by Cantonese speakers

Also available in print.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2008.A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 27-29).published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

An acoustic analysis of the Cantonese whispered tones

"A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, December 31, 2004."Also available in print.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2004.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Perception of linguistic pitch in Cantonese-English bilingual speakers

This study investigated the perception of linguistic pitch in Cantonese-English bilingual speakers. Two age groups of bilingual speakers (age 10-13 and age 20-23) were recruited and attended the experiment which included three sessions: Cantonese lexical tone perception test, English lexical stress perception test, the mixed mode test of lexical tone and lexical stress. The stimuli were fifty-five CVCV non-words with fifteen different tone contrasts in lexical tone test, and with initial stressed or final stressed in lexical stress test. The results showed that adults performed significantly better than the children in both lexical tone and lexical stress perception. Children had similar performance in tone and stress perception but adults performed better in stress perception than tone perception. The tone contrasts of mid level-low level, and high rising-low rising were the most difficult to discriminate for both children and adults. Findings suggest that bilingual speakers used the same perception strategy in perceiving linguistic pitch of lexical stress and lexical tone and the language experience still affected and improved the suprasegmental acquisition after age of 10-13.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Tone discrimination of Cantonese and Mandarin between tonal and non-tonal speakers

This study investigated the perception of Cantonese and Mandarin tones by both tonal and non-tonal language speakers. Eighty subjects were recruited from four language groups (native Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Cantonese listeners who are Mandarin naïve). There were two parts in this study: the first experiment focused on Cantonese tones, while the second experiment focused on Mandarin tones. Participants were asked to discriminate if there were any tone differences between two target words in carrier phrase. Results showed that linguistic background may not necessarily influence the perception of non-native tones, and if influence was present, it could be positive or negative. Erroneous tone patterns from different native language groups were compared in regard to their native language’s tone inventory and also in terms of psychoacoustic features. Other factors that may influence cross-language tone perceptions were also discussed.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science