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23
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Introduction
Dr. William Choi is an Assistant Professor of Speech-Language Pathology at The University of Hong Kong. He graduated from The University of Hong Kong with a BSc and PhD in Speech and Hearing Sciences. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Croucher Fellow at University College London (UCL). Dr Choi’s research focuses on tone perception, stress perception, music perception, and the connectivity between speech and music. His notable works include the Acoustic-Attentional-Contextual Hypothesis and the Dimensional Transfer Hypothesis.
Publications
Publications (23)
While many second language (L2) listeners are known to struggle when discriminating non-native features absent in their first language (L1), no study has reported that L2 listeners perform better than native listeners in this regard. The present study tested whether Cantonese-English bilinguals were better in discriminating English lexical stress i...
Can non-natives outperform natives on speech discrimination? Surprisingly, Cantonese listeners discriminated English stress more accurately than did English listeners. To ascertain its generalizability, I further ask whether this Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination is equally potent across pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts....
English listeners often struggle to perceive tones, but some are easier than others. This study examined these phenomena grounded in the Feature Weighing Perspective (FWP) and the Perceptual Assimilation Model for Suprasegmentals (PAM-S). Forty-seven English and Cantonese listeners completed 4,212 trials of Cantonese tone discrimination and sequenc...
This study investigates whether (a) Cantonese and (b) English listeners integrally or independently perceive Thai tone and segmental information. Listeners completed a modified AX discrimination task that contained a control block (without segmental variation) and an orthogonal block (with segmental variation). Relative to their own performance in...
The present study investigated the differential effects of pitched and unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning. We recruited 44 Cantonese-pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and non-musicians. They completed a Thai tone identification task and seven sessions of Thai tone word learning. In the tone identification task, th...
Research has suggested that the Perceptual Assimilation Model for Suprasegmentals (PAM-S) predicts non-native tone discrimination. This study investigates whether PAM-S applies to sequence recall. Twenty-two Punjabi speakers completed a Cantonese tone perceptual assimilation task and a Cantonese tone sequence recall task. In the perceptual assimila...
This study investigated the effect of musicianship on the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information in non-native speech perception. We tested 112 Cantonese musicians, Cantonese non-musicians, English musicians, and English non-musicians with a modified Thai tone AX discrimination task. In the tone discrimination task, the control b...
Purpose: This study investigates how Cantonese language experience influences the potential effects of (i) musicianship and (ii) musical ability on English stress perception.
Method: The sample contained 124 participants, evenly split into Cantonese musician, Cantonese non-musician, English musician, and English non-musician groups. They complete...
Can non-natives outperform natives on speech discrimination? Surprisingly, Cantonese listeners discriminated English stress more accurately than English listeners did. To ascertain its generalizability, I further asked whether this Cantonese advantage on English stress discrimination was equally potent across pitch accent and vowel reduction contex...
Musical experience facilitates speech perception. French musicians, to whom stress is foreign, have been found to perceive English stress more accurately than French non-musicians. This study investigated whether this musical advantage also applies to native listeners. English musicians and non-musicians completed an English stress discrimination t...
Given its practical implications, the effect of musicianship on language learning has been vastly researched. Interestingly, growing evidence also suggests that language experience can facilitate music perception. However, the precise nature of this facilitation is not fully understood. To address this research gap, I investigated the interactive e...
A prevailing conception of cross-linguistic transfer is that first language experience poses perceptual interference, or at best null effect, on second language speech perception. Surprisingly, a recent study found that Cantonese listeners outperformed English listeners on English stress perception. The present study further evaluated whether segme...
The OPERA Hypothesis theorizes how musical experience heightens perceptual acuity to lexical tones. One missing element in the hypothesis is whether musical advantage is general to all or specific to some lexical tones. To further extend the hypothesis, this study investigated whether English musicians consistently outperformed English nonmusicians...
Purpose
Cantonese lexical tone awareness is closely associated with 1st language Cantonese vocabulary knowledge, but its role in 2nd language English vocabulary knowledge was unclear. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and, if so, how Cantonese lexical tone awareness contributes to English expressive vocabulary knowledge in Hong Kong...
This study examined the roles of first-language (L1) Chinese and second-language (L2) English phonological skills in English and Chinese reading comprehension, respectively, and their association with reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. We tested 258 second graders on nonverbal intelligence, workin...
A growing body of cross-linguistic research has suggested that morphological awareness plays a key role in both L1 and L2 word reading among bilingual readers. However, little is known about the interaction and development of L1 and L2 morphological awareness in relation to word reading. We addressed this issue by evaluating the unique contribution...
Long-term musical training is widely reported to enhance music pitch perception. However, it remains unclear whether tone language experience influences the effect of long-term musical training on musical pitch perception. The present study addressed this question by testing 30 Cantonese and 30 non-tonal language speakers, each divided equally into...
Poor comprehenders have reading comprehension difficulties but normal word recogni-tion ability. Here, we report the first study, which investigated (i) the dissociation and(ii) the prevalence of L1–L2 reading comprehension difficulties, and (iii) the levels ofkey metalinguistic skills in poor comprehenders among Chinese-English bilingualchildren. Fro...
This study investigated how Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity contributed to English lexical stress sensitivity among Cantonese children who learned English as a second language (ESL). Five-hundred-and-sixteen second-to-third grade Cantonese ESL children were tested on their Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity, English lexical stress sensitivity, g...
The current study adopted the MMN additivity approach to examine the pre-attentive perceptual integration of vowels and tones. Twenty Cantonese listeners participated in the ERP experiment. Using the passive oddball paradigm, we elicited tone-MMN, vowel-MMN and double-MMN in the speech condition; and fundamental frequency-MMN, formant frequency-MMN...
