Separated and reunified: An apparent time investigation of the voice quality differences between Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese.

Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) and Guangzhou Cantonese (GZC) are two major accents of Cantonese spoken in two geographically non-contiguous cities in Southern China. Previous studies were unable to identify the phonetic features that discern the two accents since they share the same phonological system. This study attempted to solve the puzzle by investigating the voice quality differences between the two accents through acoustic analysis on the speech output of 191 talkers in three age groups ranging from 18 to 65 years old.

Tone mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese: An asymmetry of production and perception.

This paper examines the tone-merging phenomenon in Hong Kong Cantonese. Both perception and production tasks were administered to 120 participants with ages ranging from 20 to 58 years. After considering the complicated interplay of perception and production confusion, the paper provides statistical evidence that three tonal contrasts have undergone merging in contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese.

Relationship between individual differences in speech processing and cognitive functions.

A growing body of research has suggested that cognitive abilities may play a role in individual differences in speech processing. The present study took advantage of a widespread linguistic phenomenon of sound change to systematically assess the relationships between speech processing and various components of attention and working memory in the auditory and visual modalities among typically developed Cantonese-speaking individuals. The individual variations in speech processing are captured in an ongoing sound change-tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese, in which typically developed native speakers are reported to lose the distinctions between some tonal contrasts in perception and/or production.

An ERP study of good production vis-à-vis poor perception of tones in Cantonese: implications for top-down speech processing.

This study investigated a theoretically challenging dissociation between good production and poor perception of tones among neurologically unimpaired native speakers of Cantonese. The dissociation is referred to as the near-merger phenomenon in sociolinguistic studies of sound change. In a passive oddball paradigm, lexical and nonlexical syllables of the T1/T6 and T4/T6 contrasts were presented to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a from two groups of participants, those who could produce and distinguish all tones in the language (Control) and those who could produce all tones but specifically failed to distinguish between T4 and T6 in perception (Dissociation).