Individual-level cross-linguistic comparisons in Toronto Cantonese and English high vowels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies of Toronto Heritage Cantonese have suggested the lack of a similar phonological contrast in English as the source of cross-linguistic influence on the phonetic production of the /y/ vs. /u/ contrast in Cantonese. By comparing both the English and Cantonese production of the same individual speakers in spontaneous speech recordings, this study addresses Chang’s (2021) call for more bilingual studies focused on individual-level cross-linguistic interactions. Results show three distinct patterns of cross-linguistic interaction: P1) three distinct vowels, P2) Cantonese /u/ merged with English /u/, and P3) Cantonese /y/ merged with English /u/. While P1 was the most frequently occurring pattern, the occurrence of P3 exclusively among second-generation speakers, among those with lower Cantonese Production Scores, and among those with the lowest Pillai Scores suggest that cross-linguistic phonetic similarity is what drives decreased acoustic distance between /y/ and /u/ rather than direct transfer of phonological categories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".