Paper Info
Title
Influence of English Donor Word Stress on Tonal Assignment in Cantonese Loanwords - An Acoustic Account.
Abstract
This study aims to identify the relationship between tone and stress in Cantonese loanwords borrowed from English. Tonal patterns of 23 disyllabic and trisyllabic Cantonese loanwords corresponding to English donor words of 20 different stress patterns, and the tonal patterns of 23 unassimilated Cantonese loanwords exhausting the same set of 20 stress patterns were examined. Fundamental frequency characteristics of the vowels extracted from the loanwords produced by 15 native Cantonese speakers were analysed by using Praat. The average F0s were calculated in Matlab with the algorithm of autocorrelation, and the F0s of vowels corresponding to stressed and unstressed/epenthetic vowels were compared with Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test. Acoustic results reveal that Cantonese loanword syllables corresponding to stressed syllables in the English donor words were assigned high-level tone whereas epenthetic syllables and those corresponding to unstressed syllables were usually assigned low-level or low-falling tone, and highrising tone for word-final syllables. This is consistent with previous findings proving the explicit correlation between English lexical stress and high tone, and that between English lexical non-stress and mid or low tones in Cantonese loanwords.
Year
Venue
Field
2011
ICPhS
Stress (linguistics),Wilcoxon signed-rank test,Speech recognition,Loanword,Linguistics,Mathematics
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wience Wing-sze Lai100.34
Dongning Wang221.32
Nan Yan312.32
Victor Chan421.66
Lan Zhang537133.67