Consonantal Effects of Aspiration on Onset F0 in Cantonese

Consonantal effects on onset f0 are implemented differently in different languages, namely, the duration of consonantal effect, the direction of f0 change and its perceptual importance vary cross-linguistically. This study aims to investigate consonantal effects of aspiration in a tone language, Cantonese. The results showed that aspiration had a raising effect on onset f0, that is, onset f0 after aspirated stops was higher than after unaspirated stops. Besides, the aspiration-related f0 perturbations can extend to around 100ms after voicing. However, unlike f0 as a secondary cue for stop contrasts in English, when voice onset time (VOT) becomes ambiguous, f0 was not strengthened for contrast enhancement in Cantonese as well as in L2 English. This indicates that although consonantal effects in Cantonese showed phonetically similar directions and comparable duration with native English, onset f0 was not used for phonological contrast enhancement.