Production and perception across three Hong Kong Cantonese consonant mergers: Community- and individual-level perspectives

Abstract

Individual variation is key to understanding phenomena in phonetic variation and change, including the production-perception link. To test the generalizability of this relationship, this study compares community- and individual-level variation across three long-standing consonant mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese speakers: [n]→[l], [ŋ̩]→[m̩] and [ŋ-]↔Ø. Concurrently, we document these understudied mergers in a community that has undergone rapid social change in recent decades. Younger (college-aged) and older (middle-aged) Hong Kongers completed a reading/translation production task followed by a forced choice lexical identification perception task. Group-level results suggest mismatching production and perception: while the community overall distinguished merger pairs in production, younger listeners are more perceptually categorical than older listeners. However, aggregate results obscure the fact that individuals vary substantially in the extent of merging in both perception and production, including many who exhibit complete merger, and that individual-level production-perception correlations were found for [n]→[l] and [ŋ̩]→[m̩], though not [ŋ-]↔Ø. Results are discussed in the context of previous research. We find that (i) these mergers have diverged from predicted trajectories of completion, and (ii) overall, prior findings on the production-perception link are generalizable to these consonant mergers.

Production and Perception Evidence of a Merger: [l] and [n] in Fuzhou Min

“…This result is consistent with Labov's (1994) sound change model regarding generational gender difference, which predicts that when a sound change is close to completion, female and male speakers converge in their speech behavior (p. 309). The current absence of an effect of gender differs from the gender effect found in Vancouver Cantonese (Cheng et al, 2019), in which older females used the more innovative form of the merger. Our older group (aged 45-56 in production; aged 45-58 in perception) was slightly younger than the older group (aged 52-64) in Cheng et al (2019), and it is possible that the Fuzhou Min older participants were in a more advanced state of the merger than the Vancouver Cantonese older participants.…”

“…The current absence of an effect of gender differs from the gender effect found in Vancouver Cantonese (Cheng et al, 2019), in which older females used the more innovative form of the merger. Our older group (aged 45-56 in production; aged 45-58 in perception) was slightly younger than the older group (aged 52-64) in Cheng et al (2019), and it is possible that the Fuzhou Min older participants were in a more advanced state of the merger than the Vancouver Cantonese older participants.…”

“…Gender also influenced the production of the [l~n] merger by Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Vancouver (Cheng et al, 2019). The transcribed production data (transcribed by a native Cantonese speaker) showed that bilingual Cantonese speakers pronounced prescriptive nasal onsets as [l].…”

“…For social factors, older speakers are predicted to show higher degrees of the merger than younger speakers in both production and perception. Given sociolinguistic research that suggests that females are expected to use the innovative [l] forms more frequently than males (Cheng et al, 2019), we predict that females may tend toward the lateral direction more than males.…”

Regular exposure facilitates dual-mapping of Cantonese pronunciation variants

“…While the historical progression of the sound change has been investigated from a sociolinguistic perspective, there are few phonetic studies that examine the consequences for perception or recognition. Cheng (2017) and later Cheng et al (2022) represent the first attempts at carefully examining Cantonese [n] and [l] in perception. In Cheng (2017), older and younger groups of early Cantonese-English bilinguals recruited from Hong Kong and Vancouver took part in a two-alternative forced choice word identification task where listeners heard tokens from a synthesized [n]-to-[l] continuum.…”