Prosodic interaction in Cantonese-English bilingual children’s speech production

This corpus-based study investigates intonation patterns in the production of Cantonese by Cantonese-English bilingual children. We examine the intonation patterns in eight simultaneous bilingual children acquiring a tonal (Cantonese) and an intonational language (English) from 2;0 to 3;0. Two intonation patterns are observed in all the bilingual children studied: high pitch followed by a fall (including H_H*L% and H_L*L%) and low pitch followed by a rise (including L_H*H% and L_L*H%), in which English-like intonation is applied to Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. They illustrate cross-linguistic influence in prosody from English in the bilingual children’s early phonological development. Language dominance, use of sentence-final particles, and the children’s grammatical complexity are found to be significant predictors for the production of bilingual intonation. First, the more dominant the child is in Cantonese, the less bilingual intonation is produced in Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. Second, bilingual intonation is significantly more likely to be produced in utterances with sentence-final particles than without. Third, the greater the child’s grammatical complexity, the lower the predicted probability of producing bilingual intonation.