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.
Highlights
Most models of second language speech perception emphasize how differences in phonetic inventories—i.e., the specific vowels and consonants used in a language—affect bilinguals’ segmental speech perception [1,2,3]
Pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni correction suggested that the F0 major slope values of T1 and T6 were statistically indistinguishable from each other (p = 1.00), and that all other pairwise comparisons were statistically significant
The present study demonstrates that, Cantonese tone and English stress differ in their acoustic composition and linguistic function, both are perceived well by Cantonese-English bilingual children who simultaneously learned one tone language (Cantonese) and one stress language (English)
Summary
Most models of second language speech perception emphasize how differences in phonetic inventories—i.e., the specific vowels and consonants used in a language—affect bilinguals’ segmental speech perception [1,2,3]. Cantonese lexical tones are pitch patterns used to minimally distinguish word meanings [5]. Like Cantonese tone, English stress uses pitch to convey such differences, but in contrast with tone, it only does so in conjunction with other acoustic parameters such as duration and intensity. These pitch-based differences, in single syllables in the case of tone and between contiguous syllables in the case of stress, have been largely unexplored in speech perception, especially for bilinguals of a tonal language (Cantonese) and a stress language (English). The goal of the present study is to examine similarities and differences in the perception of Cantonese tones and English stress patterns by Cantonese-English bilinguals, comparing bilingual children, bilingual adults, and English monolingual adults
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