International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
English Donor Words and Equivalent Cantonese Loanwords Pronounced by
Hong Kong Cantonese ESL Learners - Implications for Teaching English Word
Stress
Wience Wing Sze Lai ª Manwa L. Ng ᵇ *
ª Hong Kong Community College, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of
Hong Kong
ᵇ Speech Science Laboratory, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong
Abstract
This study examined English word stress produced by native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who were
learning English as a second language (ESL). Twenty-two ESL speakers (F=11; M=11) including 11 highly
proficient and 11 less proficient participated in the study. They were instructed to read four pairs of English
words and the corresponding Cantonese loanwords. Pitch, duration, intensity values were obtained from all the
stressed English syllables and their corresponding Cantonese syllables. Results revealed significantly higher
pitch but similar durational and intensity characteristics associated with these syllables when compared with the
unstressed counterparts in English and corresponding syllables in Cantonese. The findings confirm that pitch
serves as the most dominant acoustic cue for stressed syllables, even in English produced by Cantonese ESL
speakers. It follows that other less dominant acoustic features (such as intensity and duration) should be
emphasised in ESL teaching, especially to the less proficient ESL speakers.
Keywords. English word stress, Cantonese loanwords, acoustic cues
Introduction
English is a stress language whereas Cantonese is a tone language. It has been well documented that the
phonetic cues to stress are pitch (fundamental frequency), intensity (loudness), duration (length) and vowel
quality, but the only phonetic cue to tone is pitch. Previous studies on Cantonese’s realisation of English word
stress mainly adopted two approaches: - one through investigating Cantonese loanwords borrowed from English,
the other through investigating the pronunciation of English words by Chinese speakers.
Cantonese Loanwords Borrowed from English
The present study was inspired by studies by Lai (2004), Lai, Wang, Yan, Chan, and Zhang (2011), Zhang
(1986) and Silverman (1992). Though all these studies agreed on the assignment of a high level (55) tone to
loanword syllables corresponding to stressed ones in English, Lai (2004) provided an update on the tonal
assignment in other loanword syllables. Similar to Zhang (1986), a low-mid (22) tone was assigned to epenthetic
loanword syllables. Differently, loanword syllables corresponding to unstressed syllables, which Zhang (1986)
reported to carry a mid (33) tone, was assigned a low-mid (22) tone. Table 1 lists some typical loanword
examples as reported in Lai (2004), with different tonal patterns assigned according to their respective
phonological structures:
E-mail address: ccwience@hkcc-polyu.edu.hk , manwa@hku.hk
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