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

Abstract

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.

Perception and lexical encoding of tone in a restricted tone language: Developmental evidence from Limburgian

“…Our results demonstrated that Limburgian adults are significantly more accurate than Dutch adults in betweencategory variation trials, which is most likely due to the lexical distinctiveness of tone in Limburgian. This is in line with previous research suggesting that tone language speakers are at an advantage in discriminating lexical tones compared to naïve non-tone language speakers (e.g., [27][28][29][30][31]).…”

Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children

“…However, language history of children reported by parents/guardians is more immediate and likely to be more accurate. Previous studies indicate that adult and child bilinguals do not necessarily show the same pattern of processing compared to monolingual age-matched participants (Baker et al, 2008;Brice, Gorman & Leung, 2013;Rinker, Shafer, Kiefer, Vidal & Yu, 2017;Tong, Lee, Lee & Burnham, 2015). For example, children who begin learning the L2 before five years of age may still demonstrate differences from monolinguals and these differences may be related to insufficient input.…”

Double dissociations in reading comprehension difficulties among Chinese–English bilinguals and their association with tone awareness

“…Chinese lexical tone awareness was measured with a tone identification task and a tone discrimination task, both used successfully in prior research (Tong, McBride, & Burnham, ; Tong et al, ). In the tone identification task, participants were presented with two pictures of minimal pairs contrasting in tones but not segmental structure, for example, /ji2/ 椅 (chair) and /ji6/ 二 (two).…”

“…This indicated that English lexical stress could contribute to reading comprehension beyond lexical access. Given the sensitivity of Chinese–English bilingual children to English lexical stress (Choi, Tong, & Cain, ; Tong et al, ), it might be possible that the findings earlier were applicable to L2 English reading comprehension(Tong, Lee, Lee, & Burnham, ). Taken further, it is not unreasonable to speculate that poor comprehenders of L2 English may have deficits in English stress sensitivity.…”