Tonal production of early and late Canadian Cantonese bilinguals

Abstract

Previous studies show that native speakers have exhibited changes in both phonetic and phonemic characteristics in their L1 production and perception after living in an L2 community for years. Little is known if the phenomenon is also present in the tonal production of native speakers of tone languages who grew up in an English-speaking environment. This research examines both the phonetic and phonemic features of the six Cantonese tones (i.e., vowel duration, pitch contour, and tonal space) produced by two groups of adult Canadian Cantonese bilinguals: early (AOA: less than 1 year) and late (AOA: 10–13 years). The data collected were compared with those of a group of native Cantonese speakers (AOA: greater than 18 years). Analyses revealed that (i) both the early and the late bilinguals produced significantly longer vowel durations than did the comparison group, and that (ii) their pitch contours and tonal space were significantly different from those of the native speakers. In addition, the early bilinguals’ tonal productions were more deviant from the native productions than those of the late bilinguals.