This study investigates the prosodic features of Cantonese-English code-mixed speech. It is found that the prosody of the matrix language is hardly altered, while the prosody of the embedded language is assimilated to that of the matrix language. That is, the rhythmic pattern is shifted towards syllable-timing, whereas the variations in the F0 pattern are mainly in the word-final syllable: for a stressed syllable the F0 contour turns flat, while for a posttonic unstressed syllable the F0 contour falls more steeply than in monolingual English speech. Such F0 variations can be explained by the phonological interaction of English lexical stress and Cantonese lexical tone. In addition, the F0 of the embedded English word tends to become higher due to the embedding effect. Index Terms— Code-mixing, timing, F0, stress, tone
Cite as: Gu, W.-T., Lee, T., Ching, P.C. (2008) Prosodic Variation in Cantonese-english Code-mixed Speech. Proc. International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, 342-345
@inproceedings{gu08_iscslp,
author={Wen-Tao Gu and Tan Lee and P. C. Ching},
title={{Prosodic Variation in Cantonese-english Code-mixed Speech}},
year=2008,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing},
pages={342--345}
}