Nuclear tones in Hong Kong and British English

This paper contributes data towards a phonological description of intonation in Hong Kong English (HKE), an emergent, ‘nativising’ but under-described variety of English spoken primarily as the second language of L1 Cantonese speakers. We demonstrate choice and realisation of nuclear tones for ten HKE-speaking and ten British English (BrE)-speaking university students. All speakers were recorded undertaking a storytelling task in which different nuclear tones are canonically associated with different types of utterance, e.g., yes/no question and sarcastic statement. New BrE data not only provide a point of comparison, but also demonstrate ways in which form and function of contemporary BrE prosody have changed since the textbook descriptions of the last century. Greatest disparity between the groups is found for ‘tag’ phrases such as in checking, and in the paralinguistic use of rise-fall. Production of target contours ranged from 64 to 86% for the BrE cohort, 43-71% for HKE

The Acquisition of Lexical Tone in Various Contexts

More than half of the world’s languages are tone languages, but the acquisition of lexical tone by children is much less well understood compared to the acquisition of consonants and vowels. Early studies show that children have acquired lexical tones by the age of two years, well ahead of their acquisition of segments. Some recent studies revisited tone acquisition in Mandarin and Cantonese and found that tone acquisition is more protracted than previously thought. Besides, many studies demonstrated cross-linguistic influence in bilingual acquisition of segments, but little is known about the acquisition of lexical tone in a bilingual context. Tone sandhi involves higher order, sometimes very complex, phonological alternations of lexical tone, however, children’s acquisition of complex tone sandhi remains largely unexplored. This talk will address the above interesting issues by discussing Cantonese lexical tone acquisition in monolingual and bilingual contexts, and children’s acquisition of the famous tone-sandhi circle in Xiamen Southern Min

The perception-production link in intonation: evidence from German learners of English

Investigations of the link between the perception and production of prosody by language learners can inform theories of prosody perception and production, especially with regard to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for the implementation of prosody in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). The perception and production of prosody in L2 speech are often analyzed separately, but the link between the two is rarely the focus of investigation [e.g. 1, 2]. In a previous study [3], we analyzed the perception of prosody in read speech by German learners of English (n=20), who performed similarly to the British English (BrE) control group (n=25) for some sentence types (e.g. statements, yes/no-questions) and worse for others (e.g. open and closed tag questions, sarcasm). The present study extends this analysis by comparing the same learners' perception and production of prosody in read speech with the same sentence types. Overall, the learners (n=20) performed better in production and were more similar to the native speakers' (n=10) performance than in the perception task. However, the learners significantly differed from the native controls in production, i.e. closed tag questions and checking questions. Interestingly, the learners also performed significantly better in yes/no and statement questions than the native speakers

Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages: The Role of Lexical Tones

First Published May 9, 2017Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first investigation of the role of consonants and vowels in statistical speech segmentation by native speakers of Cantonese, as well as assessing how tones modulate the processing of vowels. Results show that Cantonese speakers are unable to use statistical cues carried by consonants for segmentation, but they can use cues carried by vowels. This difference becomes more evident when considering tone-bearing vowels. Additional data from speakers of Russian and Mandarin suggest that the ability of Cantonese speakers to segment streams with statistical cues carried by tone-bearing vowels extends to other tone languages, but is much reduced in speakers of non-tone languages.The research leading to these results has received funding from: the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC [grant agreement 269502, PASCAL]; the Chilean CONICYT program PIA/BASAL [grant FB0003]; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; and the Basque Foundation for Science (Ikerbasque)

Influences on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation

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Comparing native and non-native speech rhythm using acoustic rhythmic measures: Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin and English

This study investigates the speech rhythm of Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese-accented English and Mandarin accented English using acoustic rhythmic measures. They were compared with four languages in the BonnTempo corpus: German and English (stress-timed) and French and Italian (syllable-timed). Six Cantonese and six Beijing Mandarin native speakers were recorded reading the North Wind and the Sun story with a normal speech rate, telling the story semi-spontaneously and reading the English version of the story. Both raw and normalised rhythmic measures were calculated using vocalic, consonantal and syllabic durations (ΔC, ΔV, ΔS, %V, VarcoC, VarcoV, VarcoS, rPVI_C, rPVI_S, nPVI_V, nPVI_S). Results confirm the syllabletiming impression of Cantonese and Mandarin. Data of the two foreign English accents poses a challenge to the rhythmic measures because the two accents are syllable-timed impressionistically but were classified as stress-timed by some of the rhythmic measures (ΔC, rPVI_C, nPVI_V, ΔS, VarcoS, rPVI_S and nPVI_S). VarcoC and %V give the best classification of speech rhythm in this study

English intonation in storytelling: a comparison of the recognition and production of nuclear tones by British and Hong Kong English speakers

This paper presents data for a tightly controlled perception and production study of English language intonation in reading by native speakers of British English and second language learners of English in Hong Kong. We demonstrate a relatively high correlation between the scores for the two studies when data are separated by utterance type (statement, echo, wh-question, etc.). Our finding that this cohort of English learners performs better at production of nuclear tones than in the corresponding perception study adds support to the claim that the perception-production link, a theory that production is contingent on perception, is not borne out by the empirical study of learners of World Englishes. Data collected for the British English speakers give insight into a changing intonational phonology, while Hong Kong data indicate differences in intonational categories, a different distribution of tones, and possibly tonal innovation