Perception of lexical tones by homeland and heritage speakers of Cantonese by Wai Man Lam B. A., The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004 M. Phil., The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Linguistics) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) November 2018 c Wai Man Lam, 2018 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Perception of lexical tones by homeland and heritage speakers of Cantonese submitted by Wai Man Lam in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. Examining Committee: Kathleen Currie Hall, Department of Linguistics Co-supervisor Douglas Pulleyblank, Department of Linguistics Co-supervisor Molly Babel, Department of Linguistics Supervisory Committee Member Valter Ciocca, School of Audiology and Speech Sciences University Examiner Marton´ Soskuthy,´ Department of Linguistics University Examiner ii Abstract This dissertation compares the lexical tone perception abilities of two populations with different bilingual configurations: Cantonese-dominant adults who grew up in Hong Kong (referred to as homeland speakers), and English-dominant adults who grew up in a Cantonese-speaking household in Canada (heritage speakers). From infancy both were exposed to Cantonese as a first language in terms of chronological order; however, after the onset of schooling, each became dominant in the majority language of their respective society. Given this background, this study investigates whether heritage speakers’ perception of lexical tones of a non-dominant first language (Cantonese) exhibits cross-language effects from a dominant second language (English) that does not have a contrastive dimension of tone. A series of perception experiments was conducted using the word identification paradigm. Eight types of audio stimuli were presented to homeland and heritage speakers (N=34 per group), each of which represented a specific configuration of four variables: whether the acoustic signal contained segmental and tonal information, whether the target word was isolated or embedded in a carrier sentence with semantic context, and whether the meaning of the target word was congruous with the carrier sentence. In each trial, participants saw pictures of the target word and minimally contrastive tonal competitors, and were instructed to choose the picture that represented what they heard. Major findings of this study were: (1) among the eight stimulus types, the accuracy gap between the two groups was the biggest when the iii stimuli were low-pass-filtered monosyllables with no segmental information or semantic context, which suggests that homeland speakers have a significantly greater ability to identify tonally contrastive words by solely relying on tonal information. (2) Both groups showed confusion of overlapping subsets of tone pairs, but heritage speakers had a higher error percentage, which indicates a quantitative but not qualitative difference between the two groups. (3) When the target word was semantically incongruous with the carrier sentence, homeland speakers outperformed heritage speakers by attending to acoustic information, while heritage speakers relied on semantic information relatively more often. In other words, the two groups used different listening strategies in tone identification. iv Lay Summary The purpose of this research is to investigate effects of post-childhood linguistic experience on bilingual speakers’ ability to perceive speech sounds of a first language that uses pitch variation to distinguish word meaning. Sixty-eight young adults raised by Cantonese-speaking parents performed a listening task. Cantonese words and sentences were played and participants were instructed to select a picture that represented what they heard. Half of the subjects grew up in Hong Kong, and the other half grew up in Canada and generally felt more comfortable with English. Although both groups were exposed to Cantonese from birth, the Hong Kong group was better at paying attention to the pitch of a word, while the Canadian group relied on the overall meaning of a sentence relatively more often. These results inform us how multilingual competence works in the human mind, especially in a world where migration is common. v Preface This dissertation is an original intellectual product of the author, Wai Man Lam. The name Zoe Wai-Man Lam is also used in other published works by the author. All projects and associated methods were approved by the Behavioural Research Ethics Board of the University of British Columbia [certificate #H16-00297]. All data collection took place in the Speech in Context Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. A preliminary version of Chapter 1, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 was presented at the 29th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics held at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in June 2017. vi Table of Contents Abstract . iii Lay Summary . v Preface . vi Table of Contents . vii List of Tables . xi List of Figures . xv The LSHK Cantonese Romanization Scheme . xix List of Abbreviations . xx Glossary . xxi Acknowledgments . xxiii Dedication . xxv 1 Introduction . 1 1.1 Cantonese in Canada . 1 1.2 Heritage speakers of Cantonese . 2 1.3 Goals of this dissertation . 6 1.4 The Cantonese language . 9 vii 1.4.1 Origin and spread . 9 1.4.2 Is Cantonese a language? . 9 1.4.3 Segmental inventories . 13 1.4.4 Syllable structure . 15 1.4.5 Tones . 16 1.4.6 Romanization . 20 1.4.7 Writing system . 21 1.4.8 Summary . 23 1.5 The structure of this dissertation . 23 2 Who Are Heritage Speakers? . 25 2.1 Defining key terms . 25 2.1.1 Heritage languages . 26 2.1.2 Bilingualism . 28 2.1.3 Language dominance . 30 2.1.4 Heritage and homeland speakers . 32 2.2 Configurations on the bilingual continuum . 34 2.2.1 Configuration A: Monolinguals . 35 2.2.2 Configurations B to D: L1-dominant bilinguals . 36 2.2.3 Configuration E: Perfectly balanced bilinguals . 40 2.2.4 Configurations F to H: L2-dominant bilinguals . 40 2.2.5 Configuration I: Replacive bilinguals . 47 2.2.6 Summary . 49 3 What Is Tonal Perception? . 51 3.1 The acoustic and perceptual aspects of lexical tone . 51 3.2 Perception of Cantonese tones by Cantonese-learning infants and children . 53 3.3 Perception of Cantonese tones by adult homeland speakers . 56 3.3.1 Acoustic and perceptual correlates of tone identity . 57 3.3.2 Tone mergers . 59 3.4 Perception of Cantonese tones by non-Cantonese speakers . 61 3.5 Tone and heritage speakers of Cantonese . 63 viii 3.6 Hypotheses to be tested . 66 4 Methodology . 68 4.1 An overview of the experimental design . 68 4.1.1 The word identification paradigm . 69 4.1.2 Variables being controlled . 71 4.1.3 Stimulus types . 71 4.1.4 Summary . 77 4.2 Pilot Study 1: Familiarity with target words . 79 4.2.1 Background and purpose . 79 4.2.2 Procedures . 86 4.2.3 Participants . 87 4.2.4 Results . 88 4.3 Pilot Study 2: Semantic congruity of sentences . 91 4.3.1 Background and purpose . 91 4.3.2 Procedures . 92 4.3.3 Participants . 93 4.3.4 Results . 94 4.4 Main study . 95 4.4.1 Materials . 95 4.4.2 Procedures . 102 4.4.3 Participants . 114 5 Results . 129 5.1 Overview: Hypothesis testing with generalized logistic mixed models . 130 5.2 Response to Research Question 1: Accuracy . 138 5.2.1 With vs. without context . 142 5.2.2 With vs. without congruity . 147 5.2.3 With vs. without segmental information . 151 5.2.4 With vs. without tonal information . 155 5.2.5 Interim summary . 159 5.3 Response to Research Question 2: Confusion patterns . 161 ix 5.3.1 How to read a confusion matrix . 161 5.3.2 The Mantel test for comparing global similarity of matrices . 164 5.3.3 Comparison of confusion patterns . 175 5.3.4 Interim summary . 187 5.4 Response to Research Question 3: Use of acoustic and semantic cues . 190 6 Discussion and conclusion . 195 6.1 Summary of research findings . 195 6.2 Discussion and implications . 198 6.2.1 Sound change trends in heritage Cantonese . 198 6.2.2 Tonal perception and heritage bilingualism . 200 6.2.3 Language pedagogy for heritage learners of Cantonese 205 6.3 Conclusions . 207 References . 209 Appendix A Materials Used in the Experiment . 236 A.1 Words . 237 A.2 Sentences . 239 A.3 Pictures . 261 A.4 Instructions . 270 A.4.1 Written Cantonese . 270 A.4.2 Romanization . 271 A.4.3 English translation . 273 A.5 Story used for the story listening task . 274 A.5.1 Written Cantonese . 274 A.5.2 Romanization . 274 A.5.3 English Translation . 275 Appendix B Language background questionnaire . 276 x List of Tables Table 1.1 Top five non-official languages spoken at home in Canada in the 2016 Census (Statistics Canada, 2017c) . 3 Table 1.2 Top five non-official languages spoken at home in Metro Vancouver in the 2016 Census (Statistics Canada, 2017b) . 3 Table 1.3 Top 10 countries of birth of recent immigrants, 1981–2006 (Statistics Canada, 2009) . 3 Table 1.4 The phonemic consonant inventory of Cantonese . 14 Table 1.5 Examples of Cantonese syllables . 15 Table 1.6 The phonemic tone inventory of Cantonese; tone numerals are based on Bauer & Benedict (1997) . 16 Table 1.7 Allotones in Cantonese; tone numerals are based on Bauer & Benedict (1997) . 19 Table 1.8 Derived high rising tone in attenuative reduplication . 19 Table 1.9 The LSHK Cantonese Romanization Scheme (Jyutping) . 20 Table 3.1 The phonemic tone inventory of Cantonese .