Phonological Planning in Cantonese Word Production

This proposed project focuses on the cognitive mechanism underlying spoken word production in Cantonese. Cantonese is the major Chinese dialect used by the people in Southern China including Hong Kong. Four experiments are proposed to investigate how segmental (sub-syllabic and syllabic units) and supra-segmental (lexical tone) information are processed over the time course of phonological planning in Cantonese word production using the picture-word interference task, which is one of the most widely employed paradigms in the literature of spoken word production. In this task, Cantonese-speaking participants are asked to name aloud individually presented pictures of concrete objects and ignore an accompanying auditory word distractor. The picture and the distractor are presented either simultaneously or sequentially. The results from this project have implications for two theoretical issues. One concerns the universality of the existing prominent theories of speech production, which were developed primarily from the research on non-tonal languages such as Dutch and English. The other relates to how language-specific properties can be explained in the use of tonal languages such as Cantonese or Mandarin. Practically, the findings provide valuable insights for the improvement of speech quality among tonal language users, as well as for the learning and teaching of a tonal language as a means for communication.