The Effect of Lexical Tone and Sex on Nasalance in Cantonese-Speakers

Abstract

Objectives

This study aims to investigate the effect of lexical tone and sex on nasalance in Cantonese, a lexical tone language, and to identify both statistical and clinical implications.

Design

Forty Cantonese-speaking adults were recruited; 72 stimuli words based on 12 syllables across 3 syllable types (CV, CVV, CVC) and 6 lexical tones were constructed. Each stimulus was repeated 6 times, resulting in 1296 repetitions randomized for each participant. Acoustic data were annotated and mean nasalance extracted from the Nasometer^TM software.

Results

A 3-way mixed analysis of variance with sex as the between-subjects factor and syllable type and tones as the within-subjects factors showed a significant 3-way interaction effect, F(5.491,647.953) = 6.759, P < .001, partial η² = .054, a significant 2-way interaction effect of syllable type × tone, F(5.491,647.953) = 57.524, P < .001, partial η² = .328, and significant main effects, for example, sex, F(1118) = 12.078, P = .001, partial η² = .093. Females had higher nasalance than males across all syllable types. Tone 1 words and CVC syllable type yielded the highest nasalance values.

Conclusions

Study findings show an effect of lexical tone and syllable type on nasalance for males and females. The theory of transpalatal acoustic transmission is used to explain and discuss study findings. Clinical implications pertain to the potential need for separate normative databases for males and females and control of tone 1 words and syllable type (CVC) with final syllable nasal, in nasalance speech sampling material and in cross-linguistic comparisons.