Changes in the lexicon of Cantonese-speaking students from Guangzhou who are attending Hong Kong universities

Abstract

As the lexical inventories of Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese are different, this paper attempts at studying the changes of the lexicon used by a special group of university students in Hong Kong who came from Guangzhou 4 years ago. These students were from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and The Hong Kong Institute of Education and all of their mother tongue was Cantonese. In this research, two picture naming tasks were conducted to examine if these students had experienced changes in their Cantonese lexical inventories. The results were presented based on the comparison of the number of Guangzhou Cantonese lexicon and Hong Kong Cantonese lexicon they used in the picture naming tasks. Besides, follow-up individual interviews were involved to investigate the motives which drove them to change their lexical inventories. Some quotes from the participants worth considering were listed in this paper. It was found that different participants had changed their lexical inventories to various extents. Referring to the research data, the reasons that may cause people to change their lexical inventories were explored and discussed. There have been a number of studies on the changes of pronunciation that people have experienced as young adults. However, not much research has been done on the changes of the use of lexicon after the critical period for language acquisition. It is expected that this paper can illuminate the issues of lexicon changes in young adulthood and highlight the reasons behind people's lexicon changes across the lifespan.