Type and token frequencies of phonological units in Hong Kong Cantonese (original) (raw)

Abstract

This article reports, for the first time, type and token frequencies of tones, onsets, codas, rimes, and syllables of Hong Kong Cantonese. The information is derived from a computerized spoken corpus, the Hong Kong Cantonese adult language corpus (HKCAC; Leung & Law, 2001), consisting of more than 140,000 character-syllable units. Since the HKCAC is based on recordings of connected speech, comparisons are made with respect to the inventories of various phonological units between the HKCAC and standard descriptions of the Cantonese phonological system—in particular, Fok (1974) and Bauer and Benedict (1997). It is hoped that the frequency information presented here will become a valuable tool for future psycholinguistic and linguistic research in this language. The full set of these frequency counts may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive atwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, SAR
   Man-Tak Leung & Sam-Po Law
2. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
   Suk-Yee Fung

Authors

1. Man-Tak Leung
2. Sam-Po Law
3. Suk-Yee Fung

Corresponding author

Correspondence toSam-Po Law.

Additional information

The development of the HKCAC was made possible by a grant from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (HKU 5190/98H) from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong.

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Leung, MT., Law, SP. & Fung, SY. Type and token frequencies of phonological units in Hong Kong Cantonese.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 36, 500–505 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195596

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• Received: 16 May 2003
• Accepted: 04 June 2004
• Issue date: August 2004
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195596

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