Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First Articles

Prosodic interaction in Cantonese-English bilingual children’s speech production

ORCID logo | University of Pennsylvania
ORCID logo | The Chinese University of Hong Kong
ORCID logo | The University of Hong Kong
ORCID logo | The Chinese University of Hong Kong

This corpus-based study investigates intonation patterns in the production of Cantonese by Cantonese-English bilingual children. We examine the intonation patterns in eight simultaneous bilingual children acquiring a tonal (Cantonese) and an intonational language (English) from 2;0 to 3;0. Two intonation patterns are observed in all the bilingual children studied: high pitch followed by a fall (including H_H*L% and H_L*L%) and low pitch followed by a rise (including L_H*H% and L_L*H%), in which English-like intonation is applied to Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. They illustrate cross-linguistic influence in prosody from English in the bilingual children’s early phonological development. Language dominance, use of sentence-final particles, and the children’s grammatical complexity are found to be significant predictors for the production of bilingual intonation. First, the more dominant the child is in Cantonese, the less bilingual intonation is produced in Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. Second, bilingual intonation is significantly more likely to be produced in utterances with sentence-final particles than without. Third, the greater the child’s grammatical complexity, the lower the predicted probability of producing bilingual intonation.

Keywords: bilingual intonation, prosody, sentence-final particles, cross-linguistic influence, language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background
    • 1.2The prosodic systems of Cantonese and English
    • 1.3Current study
    • 1.4Hypotheses
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Inter-rater reliability
    • 3.2Bilingual intonation
    • 3.3Case illustration – Kasen’s m4 hai6 aa3 “no”
    • 3.4Mixed-effects logistic regression
      • 3.4.1Predictors
      • 3.4.2Model comparison
      • 3.4.3Mixed-effects logistic regression results
    • 3.5Mixed-effects quadratic regression
      • 3.5.1Procedures
      • 3.5.2Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Significance and limitations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21049.lee
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