The /i - ɪ/ Contrast Produced by Advanced Cantonese Learners of English

English tense vs. lax vowels (e.g. [i] in seat vs. [ɪ] in sit) are acoustically different in both spectral properties and duration. In terms of perception, native English listeners have been shown to rely primarily on vowel quality and secondarily on duration (Kondaurova and Francis 2008). In contrast, L2 learners of English, for example those whose L1s are Korean, Chinese, and Cantonese, have been observed to rely primarily on durational cues (Flege, Bohn, Jang 1997; Wang 2002, among others). In terms of production, the [i] vs. [ɪ] produced by Cantonese learner are reported to be indistinguishable in F1/F2 but different in duration, with [i] longer than [ɪ] (Hung 2000). This study investigates the acoustic properties of Cantonese learners’ production of English [i] vs. [ɪ], with a focus on advanced learners. Assuming that advanced learners’ pronunciation should be more native-like than normal learners’, it is predicted that the [i] vs. [ɪ] produced by advanced Cantonese learners should involve a distinction in vowel quality rather than simply a distinction of duration.

The participants in this study were 12 female undergraduate students, who are all English majors, at Hong Kong Baptist University. The stimuli were 20 English words like heat vs. hit, heed vs. hid, which contain [i] or [ɪ] and end with a coda stop. The target words were produced in the carrier sentence “I said ___ again.” with six repetitions for each target word. The results of the acoustic measurements (F1, F2, F3, duration, and intensity) of [i] vs. [ɪ] are summarized as in Figure 1.

To examine the contribution of different phonetic parameters in distinguishing the production of [i] vs. [ɪ], the measurement results are subjected to a linear discriminant analysis. The results show that, for advanced Cantonese learners of English, F1, duration, and intensity are the three major aspects, in order of relative importance, to differentiate [i] vs. [ɪ] in production. In terms of production, the results indicate that (i) advanced Cantonese learners are similar to native English speakers in their production of the quality of [i] vs. [ɪ], rather than simply using duration to differentiate the two vowels; (ii) advanced Cantonese learners are likely to produce the lax [ɪ] with a lower tongue height, a shorter duration, and a higher intensity, compared to the tense [i].