Cross-situational word learning of Cantonese Chinese

In this study, we recruited 60 native Cantonese speakers to participate in a standard cross-situational word-learning task to explore the cross-situational learning effects of minimal word pairs in Cantonese Chinese. In the cross-situational word-learning task, four different types of word pairs were used: (1) a non-minimal word pair [N]; (2) a consonant minimal word pair [C]; (3) a rime minimal word pair [R]; and (4) a tone minimal word pair [T]. The results showed that the participants could learn the word-referent mapping for all word-pair types, but they performed better on the N and T types than on the other two (i.e., C and R). Together with other previous evidence, these findings suggest that Cantonese language learners can learn and encode those phonetic details while they learn the word-referent co-occurrence probabilities. The results also suggested that the tonal information seemed to be more important than the other phonological components in Cantonese Chinese word learning.