This study examines the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. We adopted the analyses of previous research (Kiu, 1977; Silverman, 1992) and incorporated seeming exceptions. The major rules are: 1) The stressed syllable in English usually bears the high tone in Cantonese, and it includes both primary and secondary stress. 2) If the English word is (historically)...

Referential utterances are by their nature ambiguous to novice language learners. Each utterance consists of multiple layers of information that must be decoded: 1) the linguistic structure (how the sounds and words should be packaged into meaningful units), 2) the world structure (how people, objects and actions in the world relate to one another and which is the current focus of attention) an...

The processing of fluent speech involves complex computational steps that begin with the segmentation of the continuous flow of speech sounds into syllables and words. One question that naturally arises pertains to the type of syllabic information that speech processes act upon. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to profile regions, using a combination of whole-brain and explor...

Spontaneous language samples of 30 24-month-old toddlers diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Impairment (SLI-E) were compared with samples produced by an age-matched group of 30 typically developing toddlers. Vocalization patterns, phonetic inventories, and syllable formation patterns were compared. Toddlers with SLI-E vocalized significantly less often than their typically developing p...

One of the major findings of the recent linguistic research on Japanese is that the syllable plays a pivotal role in a variety of phonological and morphological phenomena in the mora-based prosodic system of this language. This paper attempts to reinforce this argument by proposing a significant generalization of Japanese accentuation in terms of ‘syllable weight’, an idea that each syllable ha...