Peggy Mok

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Forensic voice comparison (FVC) involving bilingual speakers presents a substantial challenge to forensic practitioners. Previous FVC research suggests that discriminatory power is, unsurprisingly, weaker in language mismatch conditions than in the language match conditions. The present paper extends on previous work examining bilingual speakers to...

Investigating the evidential value of filled pauses in cross-language forensic voice comparison Filled pauses (FPs) are known for their speaker-specific characteristics, displaying low within-speaker variability and demonstrating promising speaker-discriminatory power in forensic voice comparison (FVC) (e.g., Hughes et al., 2016). However, the evid...

Rhotic sounds are some of the most challenging sounds for L2 learners to acquire. This study investigates the production of English rhotic sounds by Mandarin–English bilinguals with two English proficiency levels. The production of the English /ɹ/ by 17 Mandarin–English bilinguals was examined with ultrasound imaging and compared with the productio...

This study is an ongoing longitudinal investigation of second language (L2) speech rhythm in newly arrived immigrants. Seven Cantonese-first-language (L1)-L2 English students lived abroad for two years in English-speaking countries, including Canada (3), the United States (2), the United Kingdom (1), and Australia (1). The ages of the students at i...

This study investigated whether a stronger accent in the L2 of Cantonese-English bilingual speakers with high levels of English proficiency correlates with greater convergence of corresponding vowels (four monophthongs (/i a (a) c u/ and five diphthongs /ai au ei ci ou (eu)/) between their two languages in identical phonetic environments. No consis...

The acquisition of English /r/ by Japanese learners is a well-known issue in speech acquisition. However, few studies have been done on how Japanese learners acquire rhotic sounds in other languages. This study aims to fill this gap by collecting both articulatory and acoustic data of Mandarin /r/ sounds by Japanese learners and native Beijing Mand...

This study investigated the developmental pattern of Cantonese vowel system by young heritage speakers (HSs). Eighteen HSs from Vancouver aged 2;0, 4;0, and 6;0 participated in a picture-naming task; seven long vowels and four short vowels were extracted and measured. Results of acoustic analysis suggested that there was no clear distinction among...

This paper explored filled pauses uh, um and m in Cantonese-Mandarin-English trilingual speech by 20 Hong Kong trilingual speakers. Duration, frequency and vowels of 1493 filled pauses were examined. Auditory analysis suggested that [ɛ, a, ə] vowels were commonly used for uh and um in the three languages. A preference for uh was found for all three...

This study provides new evidence for the claim that the domain of breathiness in Wu Chinese is a prosodic word instead of merely a syllable. Acoustic analysis of disyllabic words in Kunshan Wu shows that breathiness not only can pervade the first syllable but can also continue into the second syllable, provided that F0 is kept low. While previous r...

The use of English initialisms (e.g. VIP, henceforth 'English lettered words') in Chinese has increased substantially, with the phonetic form adapted into phonological systems of Chinese languages. Obstruents in Wu Chinese contrast phonologically in voicing, whereas true phonetic voicing is normally found word-medially (similar to English plosives)...

This study investigates the production of Mandarin neutral tone by L2 learners whose L1s were Japanese and Korean. Mandarin neutral tone (T0) is characterized by its underspecified pitch contours and shorter duration compared with the four lexical tones (T1-T4). These two important acoustic correlates of Mandarin neutral tone, pitch and duration, a...

The social meaning of voice quality has been gaining more attention in sociophonetics in recent years. However, voice quality and its social significance in Mandarin Chinese are still under-researched. This study conducts a perceptual experiment to explore the role of voice quality in stancetaking in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that listener...

Suzhou Wu Chinese has a three-way voicing contrast in obstruents and the realization of voiced obstruents is position-dependent. This paper investigated the phonetic realization of intervocalic voiceless unaspirated and voiced obstruents in Suzhou Wu. Acoustic data of disyllabic words from three age groups were collected. Closure duration, proporti...

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese–L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners’ production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error type...

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised strateg...

This paper presents data for a tightly controlled recognition and production study of English language intonation in reading by speakers of British English and second language learners of English in Hong Kong. We demonstrate a relatively high correlation between the scores for the two studies when data are separated by utterance type (statement, ec...

The present study explored the conditions under which phonological similarity effects arise without orthographic confounds by testing languages with true cognates but divergent scripts. We investigated the similarities and differences between within- and cross-script processing patterns by providing data from an understudied language pair, Korean a...

This chapter surveys issues related to the production of tone in the world’s languages. Here the term ‘tone’ refers to the localised (within-syllable) use of fundamental frequency that contrasts lexical meanings (thus excluding pitch accent and stress languages). A comprehensive review of tonal phonetics is presented covering the acoustic correlate...

Studies in language contact have identified many instances of linguistic variation and grammatical innovations introduced by speakers from multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods. This study focuses on the variety of Cantonese spoken by South Asian youths in Hong Kong, specifically their production and perception of Hong Kong Cantonese tones. Our findings...

Rhotic sounds in the world's languages have a wide range of variants, and are famous for their complexity in production. The current study examined the articulatory and acoustic features of Mandarin /ɹ/ using ultrasound imaging. The results showed that similar to English rhotics, Mandarin /ɹ/ could be articulated with various tongue shapes that wer...

Purpose Previous studies showed both early and late acquisition of Cantonese tones based on transcription data using different criteria, but very little acoustic data were reported. Our study examined Cantonese tone acquisition using both transcription and acoustic data, illustrating the early and protracted aspects of Cantonese tone acquisition....

The study investigates the perception of vowel length contrasts in Cantonese by native Mandarin speakers with varying degrees of experience in Cantonese: naïve listeners (no exposure), inexperienced learners (~1 year), and experienced learners (~5 years). While vowel length contrasts do not exist in Mandarin, they are, to some extent, exploited in...

One of the biggest unresolved questions in bilingual speech production is how L2 phonological categories are constructed given the well-established L1 categories and how phonological categories are realized phonetically. The current study aimed to investigate how bilinguals' two languages interact when the same phoneme in two languages was realized...

This paper contributes data towards a phonological description of intonation in Hong Kong English (HKE), an emergent, 'nativising' but under-described variety of English spoken primarily as the second language of L1 Cantonese speakers. We demonstrate choice and realisation of nuclear tones for ten HKE-speaking and ten British English (BrE)-speaking...

This study investigated the production and perception of the Cantonese vowel length contrast and vowel rounding contrast by South Asian (SA) students in Hong Kong. Twenty-six native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers and fifty-four SA speakers whose dominant language was Punjabi, Urdu, or English participated in an AX discrimination task and a picture na...

This study is a longitudinal investigation of second language (L2) speech rhythm in Cantonese-first-language (L1) immigrants. Seven Hong Kong students were recorded five times throughout a two-year period while they were living abroad in English-speaking countries. The speech rhythm of the read utterances in these recordings was then measured using...

The absence of overt markings of prosodic units between Syllable and Intonational Phrase in Cantonese that are comparable to Tone Sandhi Group in Wu Chinese or Accentual Phrase in Korean presents a challenge for proposals on universal prosodic hierarchy. This study is part of a larger effort to address this issue. Here we report acoustic data on /a...

A prosodically prominent syllable, namely stress, can be contrastive or non-contrastive regarding lexical meanings. Many previous studies predict that learners with fixed-stress L1s will be "stress deaf" to languages with contrastive stress. This study tested the reverse: how speakers of L1 Cantonese (lexical tone), L2 English (lexical stress) prod...

The present study investigated the acoustic cues of sarcasm in Cantonese. Ten native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers were elicited by pictures and audios to produce target utterances with three attitudes: neutrality, sincerity, and sarcasm. Six prosodic features were measured (speech rate, mean F0, F0 range, mean amplitude, amplitude range, and harmon...

This study investigates the acquisition of prosody in a third language (L3) by speakers of first language (L1) Cantonese and second language (L2) English, with the goal of understanding the factors characterising L3 prosody. Recordings of 13 trilinguals' read speech in their two non-native languages were compared with those of German and English na...

Wu Chinese, spoken in the Southeastern part of China, still preserves an ancient feature of Middle Chinese, the phonological voicing contrast. The current study aims to investigate the age variation on the phonetic nature of voicing contrast in Wenzhou dialect of Wu using speech production data obtained from the electroglottography signal. True voi...

Despite English being a core and compulsory part of the curriculum for Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, it is nevertheless often highly challenging for them. This is partly due to the discrepancies between English’s citation and spoken form and the lack of recognition this pronunciation receives within ESL classrooms. With this...

Purpose Previous studies showed early production precedes late perception in Cantonese tone acquisition, contrary to the general principle that perception precedes production in child language. How tone production and perception are linked in 1st language acquisition remains largely unknown. Our study revisited the acquisition of tone in Cantonese-...

Previous studies showed similar mappings between sounds and colours for synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike, and proposed that common mechanisms underlie such cross-modal association. The findings between vowels and colours, and between pitch and lightness, were investigated separately, and it was also unknown how language background would infl...

This article explores the acquisition of Japanese vowel and consonant quantity contrasts by Cantonese learners. Our goal is to examine whether transfer from first language (L1) is possible when L1 experience is phonemic but restricted to a small set of sounds (short vs. long vowels) and when the experience is non-phonemic, derived only at morpheme...

Previous studies on bilingual children found intact tonal development at the initial stages of interaction between Cantonese and English in successive bilingual children, whereas children exposed to both languages from birth have not been studied in this regard. We examined the production of Cantonese tones by five simultaneous bilingual children l...

This study investigates the temporal relationship between focus prosody and co-speech pointing gestures in Hong Kong Cantonese. Previous studies have generally shown a close temporal proximity between prosodic and gestural prominence: Gestural prominence tends to be aligned with stressed syllables or words. However, this finding was based solely on...

Previous studies on bilingual visual word recognition have been mainly based on European participants, while less is understood about Asian populations. In this study, the recognition of German-English cognates and interlingual homographs in lexical decision tasks was examined in the two non-native languages of Cantonese-English-German trilinguals....

Recent studies on orthographic effects on L2 phonology have typically investigated alphabetic writing systems and segmental contrasts with novice learners. The current study extends such investigation to compare orthographic effects of an opaque logographic system (Chinese characters) and a transparent schematic system (pinyin) on a suprasegmental...

Investigations of the link between the perception and production of prosody by language learners can inform theories of prosody perception and production, especially with regard to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for the implementation of prosody in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). The perception and production of prosody in L2 speech are of...

Previous research has shown that learners of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) have difficulties in understanding connected speech spoken by native English speakers. Extending from past research limited to quiet listening condition, this study examined the perception of English connected speech presented under five adverse conditions, namely multi...

Previous research suggests that intonation is a particularly challenging aspect of L2 speech learning. While most research focuses on speech production, we widen the focus and study the perception of intonation by L2 learners. We investigate whether advanced German learners of English have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in...

Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is t...

This study examined the efficacy of ultrasound technology for teaching L2 English " dark /l/ " , [ɫ], to L1 Cantonese students. In a pre-test reading, eight Hong Kong students, aged 15-16 (mean age: 15 years, 9 months), were scanned with ultrasound while reading short token sentences containing word-final [ɫ] tokens in three vowel contexts: /iː/, /...

This paper reports a production study of Japanese phonemic quantity contrasts by native speakers of Japanese, beginner learners, and advanced learners speaking Cantonese as L1. The three groups were compared using various standard durational measures. It was found that both learner groups successfully distinguished all the quantity conditions, alth...

Previous studies have consistently found an asymmetry where priming in the L1-L2 direction is stronger than that in the L2-L1 direction. However, some studies showed that an L2 immersion environment could attenuate bilingual speakers’ access to the L1 and result in a ‘bilingual disadvantage’. This study investigated how language immersion modulates...

Language transfer creates a challenge for Chinese (L1) speakers in acquiring English (L2) rhythm. This appears to be a widelyencountered difficulty among foreign learners of English, and is a major obstacle in acquiring a near-native oral proficiency. Thispaper presents a system named MusicSpeak, which strives to capitalize on musical rhythm for pr...

The study investigated the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 Cantonese-English bilinguals. The analysis of their production accuracy and modification strategies found an asymmetry in onset and coda productions, a lack of vowel epenthesis, reduction clusters to unmarked syllable structure, English-accented initial /ʃ/...

The current study examined the perceptual patterns of Korean stops, affricates and fricatives by Mandarin L2 learners and the effect of vocalic contexts, tense/lax distinction and obstruent categories on them. The assimilation patterns by L2 learners were compared with published data of naïve Mandarin listeners as well. Results revealed inconsisten...

Mimic Video is an experimental L2 teaching method that uses video production and imitation to teach English pronunciation. In early 2015, the course was delivered as a pilot program at a Hong Kong secondary school to L1 Cantonese-L2 English speakers. In the first lesson, students viewed the target video, a three-minute dramatic sequence of native E...

Previous research has shown that learners of English as a second language have difficulties in understanding connected speech spoken by native English speakers. This study examines the role of the perception of reduced forms (e.g., contraction, elision, assimilation) of English words in connected speech comprehension and the phonological skills und...

This study investigates speech similarities in bilingual identical twins using formant dynamics. Previous studies show both similarities and differences in static features between twin speakers, but it is unclear if differences also exist in dynamic features, given that identical twins have the same vocal tract anatomy which allows them to reach th...

Different sentence types are cued by various intonation patterns in English. Statements are uttered with a falling pitch while questions are cued by a raising pitch over the whole utterance. The intonation of questions in Cantonese, however, is signalled by a rising pitch at the second half of the last syllable. The current study investigates the i...

Studies of vowels in Hong Kong English (HKE) have revealed that it has diphthongs which are not dissimilar from British English (BrE). However, impressionistically, diphthongs in HKE can and do sound different. This paper looks at two perceptual phenomena: monophthongisation of GOAT; and coda consonant loss in words containing closing diphthongs fo...

Previous studies of speech and gesture in intonational languages generally suggested that prosodic and gestural prominence are aligned with one another, pitch accented/ stressed syllable or the peak fundamental frequency (F0) of it being the prosodic anchor. A logical question to raise would be whether such alignment exists in tonal languages witho...

Previous studies in interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) did not separate the effects of shared knowledge of L1 in non-native talkers from those of listeners through extensive exposure to accented L2 speech, which is crucial to the mechanism underlying ISIB. This preliminary study attempts to tease apart the two by comparing percepti...

The acoustic properties of narrow focus are language-specific. Post-focus compression of pitch is one of the most prominent factors characterizing focus in English, but it is not present in Cantonese, where duration and intensity are more dominant. Hong Kong English (HKE) is an emerging variety of English in Hong Kong, characterized by speakers who...

Previous studies suggested that the synesthesia-like coloured hearing could be found in nonsynesthetic population for both vowel quality and pitch. The vowel-colour and pitch-colour associations were investigated separately so it is unclear whether vowel quality or pitch has a stronger effect on cross-modal colour association, and how they may inte...

The phonetic realisation of speech sounds depends on their context: e.g., /t/ is aspi- rated in ‘top’, but unaspirated in ‘stop’. Similarly, Beijing Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) usually has a low contour, but preceding another T3 syllablehas a rising contour (sandhiT3). Importantly, Tone 2 (T2) also has a similar rising contour. Yet how such phonetic varia...

Very few studies have examined voice memory and speaker identification in bilingual contexts. This study investigates how well bilingual listeners can identify bilingual voices in different language conditions. 89 Cantonese-English and 89 Mandarin -English listeners participated in voice line-ups with Cantonese-English voices in the same-language a...

The question whether or not vowel quality can be maintained at F0 of the sounds exceeding statistical F1 of "normal" speech is still a matter of debate. The present study investigates the perception of long Cantonese vowels /i, y, oe, a, ɔ, u/, spoken and sung in (C)V and (C)V:S context by a well-known female Cantonese Opera singer in the range of...

The rhythmic organization of speech can vary between languages. In the present research we studied rhythmic variability between Mandarin, Cantonese and Thai using automatically retrieved prosodic temporal characteristics from read speech. We measured the variability of intervals between amplitude peaks in the amplitude envelope (<10 Hz) and the dur...

The subtle juncture cues in older varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation can be difficult for speakers of new English varieties to perceive. This study looks at the perception of word juncture characteristics in three varieties of English (British, Hong Kong and Singapore) among British, Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners in order to...

This study investigates the rhythmic structures of music and speech, and the possible corresponding rhythmic patterns between the two domains in English vocal music. With fifteen English songs as samples, lexical stress of multi-syllabic words is compared with three musical dimensions—metrical stress, duration, and pitch respectively. It was found...

Narrow focus, i.e., focus on one word, is realized differently in native English and Cantonese. While it is signaled primarily by on-focus F0 changes such as F0 range expansion in English, it is marked essentially by lengthening of duration in Cantonese. Another difference is the pitch of the post-focus elements. While native English demonstrates p...

This study investigates the acquisition of English lexical stress by simultaneous Cantonese-English bilingual children at the age of 2;06 and 3;0 respectively, comparing them with the English monolingual peers. Research on early bilingual phonological acquisition often focuses on segmental level. Few studies are available when it concerns prosodic...

Broadcast news is a distinctive register. Previous studies only provided some general descriptions of the prosodic features in broadcast news but with few concrete data. Most of them were also on English news. This study investigated the prosodic features of Cantonese TV broadcast news using acoustic data. Speech using the same materials from two g...

This study investigated how phonological knowledge and psychoacoustic mechanism interact in intonation perception. In the experiment, Mandarin and Cantonese listeners identified Mandarin statement and question in both unfiltered and low-pass filtered contexts. The results show that the importance of different perceptual factors varies depending on...

Mandarin Chinese has two orthographic systems: Chinese characters and Pinyin. While Pinyin is transparent to Mandarin pronunciation, characters are opaque and seldom relate to sound. This study aims to find out the effect of these two systems on Cantonese listeners who are L2 learners of Mandarin. Native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers participated in...