A Phonetic Analysis to Hong Kong - Accented English

Non-native speech is often perceived by a native ear as accented. Such foreign accent is not only associated with segmental deviations from the native system, but also a result of prosodic differences between the learners’ L1 and L2. As prosodic features carry important pragmatic information, successful acquisition of L2 prosody is crucial to effective communication. Deviations in supra-segmental features may affect speech intelligibility and cause difficulty in communication. This study compares read speech by Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) learners of English with those of native speakers of British and American English (NSE). The utterances produced by HKC learners are all rated as accented. We aim to identify measurable prosodic differences leading to such perceptual judgment. The prosodic correlates we examine include both duration and pitch, such as mean syllable duration, speech rate, pitch range, and rate of pitch movement.Distinctive prosodic patterns are found in HKC learners’ English. Their mean syllable durations are much longer than those of the NSE group, and show greater variations than the NSE group. Secondly, a narrower pitch range is found in the production of HKC learners’ English than that of native speakers of English. HKC learners’ speech is dominated by a rather “flat” overall pitch contour. It is believed that prosodic deviations in HKC learners’ English from NSE can be accounted for from the perspective of Chinese prosodic systems including rhythmic and tone features.