Type and token frequencies of phonological units in Hong Kong Cantonese

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 at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.