Heritage speakers contend with at least two languages: the less dominant L1 (heritage language), and the more dominant L2. Maintaining the heritage language allows heritage speakers to communicate with members of their community. In some cases, their L1 and L2 bear striking phonological differences. In the current study, we investigate this in the context of Toronto-born Cantonese heritage speakers and their maintenance of Cantonese lexical tone, a linguistic feature that is absent from English, the more dominant L2. Across two experiments, Cantonese heritage speakers were tested on their phonetic/phonological and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese. Experiment 1 was an AX discrimination task with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which revealed that heritage speakers discriminated tone pairs with distinct pitch contours better than those with shared contours. Experiment 2 was a medium-term repetition priming experiment, designed to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by examining tone representations at the lexical level. We observed a positive correlation between tone minimal pair priming and English dominance. Thus, while increased English dominance does not affect heritage speakers' phonological-level representations, tasks that require lexical access suggest that heritage Cantonese speakers may not robustly and fully distinctively encode Cantonese tone in lexical memory.

In heritage bilinguals’ sound structure, some aspects of the sound system are more prone to cross-language influence than others. In this study, we compare two different models of crosslanguage influence, a phonological markedness based model, which proposes that influence selectively affects a phonologically marked structure, and a phonetic category based model, where influence is mediated through cross-language equivalence classification of similar phones. The empirical data for the study comes from the production of the voicing contrast in English and Tagalog stops by heritage Tagalog speakers in Toronto. We compare the heritage speakers’ production with native control productions and also probe the effect of lexical stress in voicing realization as evidence for the underlying target structure of stop categories. The key empirical findings are that the heritage speakers produce their voiceless stops in both languages nearly native-like, including a native-like stress effect, but voiced stops exhibit considerable crosslanguage influence and assimilatory stress effects. We propose that the heritage speakers successfully establish separate phonetic categories for English and Tagalog voiceless stops, but form a partially merged category for English and Tagalog voiced stops. The findings provide partial support for the phonetic category based model of influence over the phonological markedness based model.

Heritage speakers contend with at least two languages: the less dominant first language (L1), that is, the heritage language, and the more dominant second language (L2). In some cases, their L1 and L2 bear striking phonological differences. In the current study, we investigate Toronto-born Cantonese heritage speakers and their maintenance of Cantonese lexical tone, a linguistic feature that is absent from English, the more dominant L2. Across two experiments, Cantonese heritage speakers were tested on their phonetic/phonological and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese. Experiment 1 was an AX discrimination task with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which revealed that heritage speakers discriminated tone pairs with disparate pitch contours better than those with shared pitch contours. Experiment 2 was a medium-term repetition priming experiment, designed to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by examining tone representations at the lexical level. We observed a positive correlation between English dominance and priming in tone minimal pairs that shared contours. Thus, while increased English dominance does not affect heritage speakers’ phonological-level representations, tasks that require lexical access suggest that heritage Cantonese speakers may not robustly and fully distinctively encode Cantonese tone in lexical memory.