Phonetic and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese heritage speakers
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.