Hong Kong Women Project a Larger Body When Speaking to Attractive Men

In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle.

Listeners’ perception of the quality of simultaneous interpreting and perceived dependence on simultaneous interpreting

With the rise of the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the number of conference speakers and attendees who use English is increasing. Simultaneous interpreting (SI) into and from English may be provided at conferences to meet the needs of individuals with differing levels of English ability. This paper reports on the findings obtained from two sets of experiments that explored the link between listeners’ perceived dependence on SI and their perceptions of its quality. The first set of experiments was conducted onsite and the second using a remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) setting. Native Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking participants were divided into two groups: one with Russian as the source language (SL) (Russian group) and the other with English as the SL (English group). Both groups listened to the same prerecorded simultaneous interpretation into Cantonese performed by a non-native interpreter. In the onsite setting, the Russian group perceived the non-native-accented interpretation more favorably than the English group did. This suggests that in onsite settings, perceived dependence on SI may be associated with perceptions of its quality; the greater the perceived dependence on SI, the higher the perceived SI quality. However, no significant differences were found between the two groups in the RSI setting. Factors such as the inaudible SL in the background, similar levels of perceived dependence, negative feelings about online learning and tensions in the state-society relationship may contribute to the similar quality perception ratings across the two RSI groups.

A New System of Cantonese one? Tone Perception and Production in Hong Kong South Asian Cantonese

Studies in language contact have identified many instances of linguistic variation and grammatical innovations introduced by speakers from multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods. This study focuses on the variety of Cantonese spoken by South Asian youths in Hong Kong, specifically their production and perception of Hong Kong Cantonese tones. Our findings show that the South Asian Cantonese speakers have a smaller tonal inventory than the canonical six-tone system of standard Hong Kong Cantonese and their tonal discrimination abilities are also more impoverished relative to their ethnic Chinese peers. Further analysis shows a positive correlation between tonal discrimination accuracy and tonal realization distinctness among the South Asian speakers, but not among the ethnic Chinese. These findings suggest that South Asian Cantonese speakers might have developed a distinct tone system from their ethnic Chinese peers.

Category Exemplar Production Norms for Hong Kong Cantonese: Instance Probabilities and Word Familiarity

The lexical system of Hong Kong Cantonese has been heavily shaped by the local trilingual environment. The development of cultural- and language-specific norms for Hong Kong Cantonese is fundamental for understanding how the speaker population organize semantic memory, how they utilize their semantic resources, and what information processing strategies they use for the retrieval of semantic knowledge. This study presents a normative database of 72 lexical categories in Hong Kong Cantonese produced by native speakers in a category exemplar production task. Exemplars are enlisted under a category label, along with the instance probabilities and word familiarity scores. Possible English equivalents are given to the exemplars for the convenience of non-HKC speaker researchers. Statistics on categories were further extracted to capture the heterogeneity of the categories: the total number of valid exemplars, the number of exemplars covering 90% of the occurrence and the probabilities of the most frequent exemplars in each category. The database offers a direct lexical sketch of the vocabulary of modern Hong Kong Cantonese in a categorical structure. The category-exemplar lists and the comparative statistics together lay the foundations for further investigations on the Hong Kong Cantonese speaking population from multiple disciplines, such as the structure of semantic knowledge, the time-course of knowledge access, and the processing strategies of young adults. Results of this norm can be also used as a benchmark for other age groups. The database can serve as a crucial resource for establishing initial screening tests to assess the cognitive and psychological functioning of the Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong population in both educational and clinical settings. In sum, this normative study provides a fundamental resource for future studies on language processing mechanisms of Hong Kong Cantonese speaking population, as well as language studies and other cross-language/culture studies on Hong Kong Cantonese.

Dissociation of tone merger and congenital amusia in Hong Kong Cantonese

While the issue of individual variation has been widely studied in second language learning or processing, it is less well understood how perceptual and musical aptitude differences can explain individual variation in native speech processing. In the current study, we make use of tone merger in Hong Kong Cantonese, an ongoing sound change that concerns the merging of tones in perception, production or both in a portion of native speakers, to examine the possible relationship between tone merger and musical and pitch abilities. Although a previous study has reported the occurrence of tone merger independently of musical training, it has not been investigated before whether tone-merging individuals, especially those merging tones in perception, would have inferior musical perception and fine-grained pitch sensitivities, given the close relationship of speech and music. To this end, we tested three groups of tone-merging individuals with various tone perception and production profiles on musical perception and pitch threshold tasks, in comparison to a group of Cantonese speakers with congenital amusia, and another group of controls without tone merger or amusia. Additionally, the amusics were compared with tone-merging individuals on the details of their tone discrimination and production profiles. The results showed a clear dissociation of tone merger and amusia, with the tone-merging individuals exhibiting intact musical and pitch abilities; on the other hand, the amusics demonstrated widespread difficulties in tone discrimination yet intact tone production, in contrast to the highly selective confusion of a specific tone pair in production or discrimination in tone-merging individuals. These findings provide the first evidence that tone merger and amusia are distinct from each other, and further suggest that the cause of tone merger may lie elsewhere rather than being driven by musical or pitch deficits. We also discussed issues arising from the current findings regarding the neural mechanisms of tone merger and amusia.

HKG: An open genetic variant database of 205 Hong Kong Cantonese exomes

HKG is the first fully accessible variant database for Hong Kong Cantonese, constructed from 205 novel whole-exome sequencing data. There has long been a research gap in the understanding of the genetic architecture of southern Chinese subgroups, including Hong Kong Cantonese. HKG detected 196,325 high-quality variants with 5.93% being novel, and 25,472 variants were found to be unique in HKG compared to other Chinese populations (CHN). PCA illustrates the uniqueness of HKG in CHN, and IBD analysis revealed that it is related mostly to southern Chinese with a similar effective population size. An admixture study estimated the ancestral composition of HKG and CHN, with a gradient change from north to south, consistent with their geological distribution. ClinVar, CIViC and PharmGKB annotated 599 clinically significant variants and 360 putative loss-of-function variants, substantiating our understanding of population characteristics for future medical development. Among the novel variants, 96.57% were singleton and 6.85% were of high impact. With a good representation of Hong Kong Cantonese, we demonstrated better variant imputation using reference with the addition of HKG data, thus successfully filling the data gap in southern Chinese to facilitate the regional and global development of population genetics.

Conceptual Blending and Slang Expressions in Hong Kong Cantonese

This paper seeks to examine nine slang words created newly in Cantonese, which started their life journey from the inventions of individuals and now constituting the established lexical means of expressing cultural conceptualizations. These slang expressions are analyzed with reference to the theory of conceptual integration (also known as “blending”) developed in Fauconnier and Turner 2002. In the analysis, four different types of conceptual integration network (i.e., simplex networks, single-scope networks, double-scope, and multiple-scope networks) are used to unravel the increasingly complex systems of cognitive operations with which the “slang” blends are created. During the discussion of the conceptual integration networks here, we were able to see how elements and relations from familiar conceptualizations can be transformed into new and meaningful ones that align along with the changes in cultural conceptualizations. It is hoped that this study shows that, despite having wide applications in the English language, the blending theory can provide an integrated and coherent account of the cognitive mechanisms by which colloquial words are constructed and construed in terms of cultural experiences specific to a given non-Anglo locality.

Hong Kong Cantonese university students’ tonal errors in Mandarin and their relation to L1 influence

After the change of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to People Republic of China, Mandarin has become increasingly important in Hong Kong society. However, it is observed that many native Cantonese speakers have problems mastering Mandarin tones despite the less complex tonal system. This study attempts to investigate the Mandarin tonal error patterns made by Hong Kong learners and the possible causes for these errors. A reading aloud test and a follow-up interview were designed to collect the data. The findings of the study show that a large number of students were confused about Mandarin tones and found them difficult to master, especially between tone 1 and tone 4 and tone 2 and tone 3. All the participants made these two mistakes in the test. This study hypothesizes that L1 negative transfer is the key factor that helps Cantonese speaking learners’ ability to establish a new tone in the L2. However, the reason for participants’ tonal mistakes is not due to one single cause; instead, the errors are caused by multiple factors, including lack of tonal knowledge, incomplete tonal acquisition, and tonal errors explained by the Speech Learning Model.