Lexical tone and stuttering in Cantonese

ABSTRACT

Cantonese is a tone language, in which the variation of the fundamental frequency contour of a syllable can change meaning. There are six different lexical tones in Cantonese. While research with Western languages has shown an association between stuttering and syllabic stress, nothing is known about whether stuttering in Cantonese speakers is associated with one or more of the six lexical tones. Such an association has been reported in conversational speech in Mandarin, which is also a tone language, but which varies markedly from Cantonese. Twenty-four native Cantonese-speaking adults who stutter participated in this study, ranging in age from 18–33 years. There were 18 men and 6 women. Participants read aloud 13 Cantonese syllables, each of which was produced with six contrastive lexical tones. All 78 syllables were embedded in the same carrier sentence, to reduce the influence of suprasegmental or linguistic stress, and were presented in random order. No significant differences were found for stuttering moments across the six lexical tones. It is suggested that this is because lexical tones, at least in Cantonese, do not place the task demands on the speech motor system that typify varying syllabic stress in Western languages: variations not only in fundamental frequency, but also in duration and intensity. The findings of this study suggest that treatments for adults who stutter in Western languages, such as speech restructuring, can be used with Cantonese speakers without undue attention to lexical tone.

KEYWORDS:

• Cantonese
• lexical tone
• stuttering

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their appreciation to Annie Fu for her participation in rating of the stuttering video samples. The authors would also like to thank Stephen Lam, Rina To for assisting with data collection.

Declarations of interest

Non-Financial Disclosures: Thomas Law, Ann Packman, Mark Onslow, Carol To, Kathy Lee and Michael Tong did not disclose any relevant non-financial relationships used in support of the research reported in this article.

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council. Financial Disclosures: Ann Packman, Mark Onslow, Kathy Lee and Carol To received funding from the Australian Research Council (Grant Code DP140100982) in support of the research described in this paper

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council. Financial Disclosures: Ann Packman, Mark Onslow, Kathy Lee and Carol To received funding from the Australian Research Council (Grant Code DP140100982) in support of the research described in this paper.