Phonetic and Lexical Encoding of Tone in Cantonese Heritage Speakers.

The participants were university students or young adults with no reported hearing, language, or neurological deficits, so the findings do not show what happens in patients with communication disorders. The heritage group was narrowly defined as second-generation Toronto-born Cantonese speakers with native Cantonese parents and English dominance, so results may not apply to all heritage speakers. Experiment 1 was unexpectedly difficult because each pair compared a male and female talker with very different pitch ranges, and even native speakers did not perform at ceiling. The 500 ms and 2,500 ms gaps did not clearly separate phonetic and phonological processing, because the gap effect was small and similar across groups, including English speakers without lexical tone. Experiment 2 used a medium-term priming task, and the paper notes that the task interpretation is not fully settled. Some results may reflect Cantonese tone mergers for T2-T5 and T3-T6, not only heritage speaker effects.

The work was supported in part by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants awarded to R.S. and P.J.M. The supplied text gives no competing-interest declaration beyond the funding statement.

Do not conclude that heritage Cantonese speakers cannot perceive tone or that tone errors indicate a hearing or language disorder. They discriminated tone similarly to native Cantonese speakers. The later finding was an association between English dominance and priming for same-pitch-shape tone pairs in a word-recognition task, not a tested clinical deficit.