An Analysis Of The Putonghua Light Accent Bias In The Cantonese-speaking Population In Hong Kong

Stress is an important prosodic feature of modern Chinese phonetic system, and it is also one of the difficulties in the second language acquisition of Cantonese. The stress errors may not only have a side effect on the PSC, but also could affect the daily communication.This article compared in neutral disyllable words and non-neutral disyllable words of 8 native Cantonese and 8 native Mandarin by both acoustic experiment and perceptual experiment. The purpose is to investigate the neutral error of Cantonese and the differences of word stress patterns by Mandarin and Cantonese.The major findings are as follows:(1)The perceptual experiment results of neutral disyllable words show that:the neutral tone affix have a big effect on the error rate of neutral disyllable words, the error rate of non-neutral disyllable words is higher; The language environment (include broad focus, narrow focus and no focus) have a little effect on the error rate of neutral disyllable words; The error rate of neutral disyllable words of Cantonese is lower, the order is:T2>T1>T3>T4; The usage frequency and familiarity of neutral tone also can affect the error rate of neutral disyllable words.(2)The acoustic experiment results of neutral disyllable words show that:Compared to Mandarin, the contour of Cantonese is flat, the pitch level of Cantonese is low, the pitch range of Cantonese is narrow, the error rate of neutral disyllable words is higher by Cantonese; The f0 contour of Cantonese has no significant change when the target word is narrow focus, but The f0 contour of Mandarin increased obviously when the target word is narrow focus; The neutral tone's duration of Cantonese is longer.(3)The perceptual experiment results of non-neutral disyllable words show that: the error of non-neutral disyllable words by Cantonese is not obvious, but the tones have significant effects on stress perception, T4 is the most likely to be perceived as stress, the order is:T4>T2>T1>T3.(4)The acoustic experiment results of non-neutral disyllable words show that: Compared to Mandarin, the contour of Cantonese is flat, the pitch level of Cantonese is low, the pitch range of Cantonese is narrow; There are have visible difference between the duration by Cantonese and the duration by Mandarin, because the tempo of Cantonese is relatively slow.The analysis revealed the characteristics and errors of Mandarin neutral disyllable words and non-neutral disyllable words by Cantonese. The results could be applied in the second language teaching, providing abundant reference for the second language teaching.