Cantonese-speaking Learners Research Articles

Visual-auditory perception of prosodic focus in Japanese by native and non-native speakers.

Speech communication is multi-sensory in nature. Seeing a speaker's head and face movements may significantly influence the listeners' speech processing, especially when the auditory information is not clear enough. However, research on the visual-auditory integration speech processing has left prosodic perception less well investigated than segmental perception. Furthermore, while native Japanese speakers tend to use less visual cues in segmental perception than in other western languages, to what extent the visual cues are used in Japanese focus perception by the native and non-native listeners remains unknown. To fill in these gaps, we test focus perception in Japanese among native Japanese speakers and Cantonese speakers who learn Japanese, using auditory-only and auditory-visual sentences as stimuli. Thirty native Tokyo Japanese speakers and thirty Cantonese-speaking Japanese learners who had passed the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test with level N2 or N3 were asked to judge the naturalness of 28 question-answer pairs made up of broad focus eliciting questions and three-word answers carrying broad focus, or contrastive or non-contrastive narrow focus on the middle object words. Question-answer pairs were presented in two sensory modalities, auditory-only and visual-auditory modalities in two separate experimental sessions. Both the Japanese and Cantonese groups showed weak integration of visual cues in the judgement of naturalness. Visual-auditory modality only significantly influenced Japanese participants' perception when the questions and answers were mismatched, but when the answers carried non-contrastive narrow focus, the visual cues impeded rather than facilitated their judgement. Also, the influences of specific visual cues like the displacement of eyebrows or head movements of both Japanese and Cantonese participants' responses were only significant when the questions and answers were mismatched. While Japanese participants consistently relied on the left eyebrow for focus perception, the Cantonese participants referred to head movements more often. The lack of visual-auditory integration in Japanese speaking population found in segmental perception also exist in prosodic perception of focus. Not much foreign language effects has been found among the Cantonese-speaking learners either, suggesting a limited use of facial expressions in focus marking by native and non-native Japanese speakers. Overall, the present findings indicate that the integration of visual cues in perception of focus may be specific to languages rather than universal, adding to our understanding of multisensory speech perception.

A large-scale repository of spoken narratives in French, German and Spanish from Cantonese-speaking learners

Interdisciplinary research on foreign language learning has important implications for learning and education. In this paper, we present the Repository of Third Language (L3) Spoken Narratives from Modern Language Learners in Hong Kong (L3HK Repository). This database contains 906 audio recordings and annotated transcripts of spoken narratives in French, German, and Spanish that were elicited from Cantonese-speaking (L1) young adults using a wordless picture book, “Frog, Where Are You?”. All participants spoke English as the second language (L2) and learned the target language as a third language (L3). We collected their demographic information, answers to a motivation questionnaire, parental socioeconomic status, and music background. Furthermore, for a subset of participants, we collected their L1 and L2 proficiency scores and additional experimental data on working memory and music perception. This database is valuable for examining cross-sectional changes in foreign language learning. The extensive data on phenotypes provide opportunities to explore learner-internal and learner-external factors in foreign language learning outcomes. These data may also be helpful for those who work on speech recognition.

Hong Kong Cantonese university students’ tonal errors in Mandarin and their relation to L1 influence

Abstract After the change of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to People’s Republic of China, Mandarin has become increasingly important in Hong Kong society. However, it is observed that many native Cantonese speakers have problems mastering Mandarin tones despite the less complex tonal system. This study attempts to investigate the Mandarin tonal error patterns made by Hong Kong learners and the possible causes for these errors. A reading aloud test and a follow-up interview were designed to collect the data. The findings of the study show that a large number of students were confused about Mandarin tones and found them difficult to master, especially between tone 1 and tone 4 and tone 2 and tone 3. All the participants made these two mistakes in the test. This study hypothesizes that L1 negative transfer is the key factor that helps Cantonese speaking learners’ ability to establish a new tone in the L2. However, the reason for participants’ tonal mistakes is not due to one single cause; instead, the errors are caused by multiple factors, including lack of tonal knowledge, incomplete tonal acquisition, and tonal errors explained by the Speech Learning Model.

Transfer of L1 tone knowledge to L2 vowel quantity contrasts as a secondary cue: The case of Cantonese learners of Japanese

Distinguishing vowel quantities in Japanese is problematic for Cantonese-speaking learners. Vowel length is lexically contrastive in Japanese but not in Cantonese. Apart from duration, fundamental frequency (F0) patterns are secondary cues to vowel length distinction. As tone is lexically contrastive in Cantonese (particularly rising vs. high level), learners would likely be able to transfer this phonological knowledge to help themselves acquire vowel length contrast in Japanese. A perception experiment was conducted in which learners listened to Japanese disyllabic words. The first syllable of which was lengthened according to the within-word vowel duration ratio in eight steps. A level or dynamic (rising or falling) F0 pattern was then imposed on the first vowel. Similar to other L2 learners, Cantonese-speaking learners did not perceive the long vs. short contrast categorically, but gradiently. While both dynamic F0 patterns signal a long vowel, they only exploited the rising pattern to recognise a long vowel. Our study suggests that learners have assimilated the falling contour to high level, both of which belong to the same tonal category in Cantonese. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Lexical-Semantic Transfer and Strategies for Teaching and Learning Putonghua Vocabulary for Cantonese-speaking Learners

Language transfer refers to the language that learners apply to the knowledge of one language to the language that they are learning. According to Bransford (2000), “all new learning involves transfer based on previous learning.” Language transfer includes positive and negative transfer. Positive transfer means the previous knowledge that the language learner obtains from the first language----phonetics, grammar, expressions, and so forth to help the learner learn the new language, while negative transfer means the previous knowledge interferes with the learner’s ability to learn the new language. In the United States, the number of Cantonese speakers who choose to study Mandarin has grown increasingly. While a number of past studies have focused on the language transfer of the phonetics system of the two languages, few studies have paid attention to the semantics system. Cantonese and Mandarin belong to Sino-Tibetan languages family and shared similar characters and grammars, however, the meanings of words with similar characters are comparatively different. Generally speaking, Cantonese speakers encounter more difficulties when learning Mandarin because of this difference of semantics system. The present study focuses on the language transfer of the semantics system from Cantonese language to Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua). By adopting Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis method, the current study (1) analyzed the difference of the meaning of the vocabulary (973 words) from the book, “Great Wall Chinese textbooks”; (2) identified the positive and negative language transfer via comparing the meaning of the words in Cantonese and Mandarin; and (3) explored the strategies that Cantonese-speaking leaner and L2 Mandarin Chinese teachers can use in Mandarin teaching and learning.

Second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by tonal and non-tonal language speakers

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners from tonal and non-tonal first language (L1) backgrounds differ in their perception and production of L2 tones. Ten English-speaking and nine Cantonese-speaking learners participated in Experiment 1, which consisted of the following three tasks: identifying auditory tonal stimuli using Mandarin tonal labels (Identification), mimicking tonal stimuli (Mimicry), and producing tones based upon Mandarin tonal labels (Reading). The results of Experiment 1 showed that the Cantonese group did not perform significantly better than the English group in perceiving and producing Mandarin tones. Both groups had significant difficulty in distinguishing Mandarin Tone 2 (T2) and Tone 3 (T3), and the Cantonese group also had additional trouble distinguishing Mandarin Tone 1 (T1) and Tone 4 (T4). Overall, across the different tasks of Experiment 1 learners had similar accuracy rates and error patterns, indicating comparable tone perception and production abilities. However, learners were significantly better at mimicking tones than at identifying or reading them, suggesting that the major difficulty learners faced in acquiring Mandarin tones was associating pitch contours with discrete tonal labels. This difficulty, however, may be specific to tone acquisition. Seven of the nine Cantonese participants took part in Experiment 2, which assessed their perceptual assimilation of Mandarin tones to Cantonese tones. The results of Experiment 2 helped explain Cantonese learners' T1–T4 confusion by showing that these two tones were mapped onto overlapping Cantonese tonal categories. However, the mapping results would not predict prevailing T2–T3 confusion as observed in Experiment 1, suggesting that this confusion stemmed from factors outside of learners' L1 experience. This study argues that the T2–T3 contrast is hard for L2 learners regardless of their native languages, because of these two tones' acoustic similarity and complex phonological relationship. This suggests that for explaining difficulties in acquisition of certain L2 sounds, factors other than learners' L1 background may also play a significant role.

Use of signalling nouns across L1 and L2 writer corpora

A signalling noun is the use of an abstract noun the full meaning (realisation) of which can only be made specific by reference to its linguistic context. Examples of nouns which can function as signalling nouns are attitude, consequence, difficulty, effect, process, reason and result. The realisation of a signalling noun may occur across clauses or within the clause. Using the ICLE Locness (L1 writers) corpus as a reference corpus and a learner English corpus written by Cantonese-speaking learners of English, this paper presents a comparison of the use of signalling nouns by these two L1 and L2 writer groups. Use of different functions, realisation patterns and selection and range of individual nouns are compared. In this way a profile is built up of the use of signalling nouns by the two target groups and areas for pedagogic intervention are identified.

Listening Strategies in ESL: Do Age and L1 Make a Difference?

* How the age of the learner affects the acquisition of an L2 is an issue that remains controversial (see, e.g., Birdsong, 1999; Harley & Wang, 1997; Singleton, 1997). Whereas most studies of this question have focused on comparing the relative success of learners who began to learn the L2 at different ages, the study reported here is concerned with learning processes at different ages. Its goal is to gain a new understanding of the listening strategies that younger and older L2 learners use to comprehend spoken English. Earlier research with native speakers of English (Harley, Howard, & Hart, 1995; Read & Schreiber, 1982) had revealed that, when listening to oral sentences in English, children 7-8 years old were most attentive to prosody-that is, the information provided by the intonation and stress patterns of the sentences-whereas adolescent and adult native speakers were more likely to attend to syntactic cues to sentence structure. Among Cantonese-speaking learners of ESL, however, different findings emerged (Harley et al., 1995). Children in three different age groups (in Grades 2, 7-8, and 11-12) all focused most heavily on the prosody of the English sentences they were asked to listen to. One interpretation of the study involving Cantonese speakers is that the listening strategies used by L2 learners of English are the same regardless of age. But it is also possible that the LI of these learners made