Phonetic and Lexical Encoding of Tone in Cantonese Heritage Speakers

Abstract

Heritage speakers contend with at least two languages: the less dominant first language (L1), that is, the heritage language, and the more dominant second language (L2). In some cases, their L1 and L2 bear striking phonological differences. In the current study, we investigate Toronto-born Cantonese heritage speakers and their maintenance of Cantonese lexical tone, a linguistic feature that is absent from English, the more dominant L2. Across two experiments, Cantonese heritage speakers were tested on their phonetic/phonological and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese. Experiment 1 was an AX discrimination task with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which revealed that heritage speakers discriminated tone pairs with disparate pitch contours better than those with shared pitch contours. Experiment 2 was a medium-term repetition priming experiment, designed to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by examining tone representations at the lexical level. We observed a positive correlation between English dominance and priming in tone minimal pairs that shared contours. Thus, while increased English dominance does not affect heritage speakers’ phonological-level representations, tasks that require lexical access suggest that heritage Cantonese speakers may not robustly and fully distinctively encode Cantonese tone in lexical memory.

Perceptual effects of lexical competition on Cantonese tone categories

“…English-dominant listeners were less accurate at identifying low-pass filtered words from their retained tonal information alone, and in the context of sentences, English-dominant listeners relied more on semantic context than tone, whereas Cantonese-dominant listeners attended to the tonal information at the expense of semantic predictability. More recently, Soo and Monahan (2023) provide evidence from a medium-term priming task that "heritage" Cantonese speakers treat tone minimal pairs like identity pairs, suggesting that tone may be encoded less precisely for English-dominant Cantonese-English bilinguals. All together, this suggests that lexical representations with less precise phonological detail may be a feature of a less-dominant language, not simply a late acquired second language (see also Soo & Monahan, 2022).…”

“…First language Cantonese speakers who are English-dominant pattern equivalently to first language Cantonese speakers who are Cantonese-dominant speakers in AX discrimination tasks (Soo & Monahan, 2017, 2023, though cf. Kan & Schmid, 2019.…”

“…Kan & Schmid, 2019. However, there is some evidence that English-dominant Cantonese speakers encode lexical tone less precisely (Lam, 2018;Soo & Monahan, 2023). In a comparison of "homeland" (e.g., Hong Kong born-and-raised) and "heritage" (e.g., Canada born-and-raised) speakers, Lam (2018) found that heritage listeners were more willing to ignore tone errors to maintain semantic coherence in sentences than homeland speakers.…”

“…In a comparison of "homeland" (e.g., Hong Kong born-and-raised) and "heritage" (e.g., Canada born-and-raised) speakers, Lam (2018) found that heritage listeners were more willing to ignore tone errors to maintain semantic coherence in sentences than homeland speakers. Soo and Monahan (2023) showed that Cantonese heritage listeners treat tone minimal pairs like identity pairs in a medium-term priming paradigm, whereas Hong Kong-based Cantonese listeners exhibit the expected lexical inhibition in that context. They interpret this as evidence that the heritage speakers encode the tone less precisely.…”

“…While we focus on first language speakers of Cantonese, the Cantonese diaspora affords a global speech community with varying degrees of language dominance in Cantonese relative to another language -English, in our case. First language speakers of Cantonese who are English dominant, but still highly proficient in Cantonese, may encode lexical tone less precisely than Cantonesedominant Cantonese-English bilinguals (Lam, 2018;Soo & Monahan, 2023). We build to our specific hypotheses in the paragraphs that follow, ultimately testing how Cantonese listeners resolve phonetic ambiguity in word-level perception given multiple factors: Lexical competition, synchronic variation for tone mergers-in-progress, and language dominance.…”