Production of the Cantonese vowels and tones by the Indonesian speakers in Hong Kong

Abstract

The present study investigates the production of the Cantonese vowels and tones by Indonesian speakers. Speech data from eight female Indonesian (IDN) speakers were collected and compared with those from eight female Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) speakers by performing acoustic analysis of the vowel formant frequencies and the F0 contours of the tones.

Results show that the Cantonese vowels /i, a, u/ which are "identical" to those in the Indonesian language are well produced by IDN speakers. The Cantonese /ɛ, ɔ/ which are “similar” to the Indonesian /e, o/ are less well produced than the Cantonese /y, ɪ, ʊ, ɵ, ɐ/ which are "new" to IDN speakers. The data support the Speech Learning Model proposed by Flege (1995, 2002). Furthermore, IDN speakers fail in differentiating the Cantonese vowels in the pairs including /y/-/i/, /y/-/u/, /i/-/ɪ/ and /a/-/ɐ/, which gives support to the Feature Hypothesis proposed by McAllister, et al. (2002).

The performance of IDN speakers in tone production is even worse. The speakers basically fail to differentiate the tones in Cantonese. This further supports the prediction of the Feature Hypothesis that learners have difficulty in acquiring the feature contrasts, such as the tone features, of L2 sounds if the features are absent in L1.

To conclude, the present study is the first time to report on the Cantonese vowels and tones produced by Indonesian speakers. The obtained data provide us a further understanding of the influence of L1 transfer on L2 pronunciation. The results of the present study also serve as the useful reference for teaching the pronunciation of Cantonese vowels and tones to Indonesian speakers.