Tone spans of Cantonese English

Poster Session IThe article can be viewed at: http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/tal_2014/papers/tl14_143.pdfThis paper examines the newly developed tones in Cantonese English, with a particular interest in the tones spanning across syllables. It attempts to provide phonetic evidence for the tone spans and demonstrate the association of tones to syllables. Audio-recording data elicited from six speakers of Cantonese English was processed with Praat, and then fitted to a smoothing spline analysis of variance with R to generate smoothing splines at 95% confidence intervals for determining if the the tones in different positions of a word are significantly different from each other. Pitch tracks of tones in individual words were also generated for a detailed examination of the tone contours of the tone spans. Results showed that the realization of different tones was restricted by the position of the syllables in a word. Those tones are significantly different from each other. H spans, Ø spans and M spans were discussed and illustrated with tonal associations