Segmental and tonal processing in Cantonese

Hsuan-Chih Chen, Chi Wing Michael YIP, Sum-Yin WONG

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapters

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

In a tone language, such as Cantonese, both segmental and tonal distinctions between words are pervasive. However, previous work in Cantonese has demonstrated that in speeded-response tasks, tone is more likely to be misprocessed than is segmental structure. The present study examined whether this tone disadvantage would also hold after the initial auditory processing of a syllable had been done. Cantonese listeners were asked to make same-different judgments on two sequentially presented open syllables along a specific dimension (i.e., onset, rime, tone, or the whole syllable) according to an instruction which was visually presented at the acoustic offset of the second syllable. Manipulating whether the difference between two syllables was in onset, rime, or tone resulted in equally robust effects across the various decision tasks on performance, indicating that tone functions as effectively as segmental structure in spoken-word processing once the related information of a syllable is encoded. Copyright © 1998. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 1998. All rights reserved.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1998

Citation

Chen, H.-C., Yip, M. C. W., & Wong, S.-Y. (1998). Segmental and tonal processing in Cantonese. In Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.21437/ICSLP.1998-446

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