Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Loanword-Induced Phonological Influence in Children’s Foreign Language English Learning: Evidence from Cantonese in China

Ruiyi XuShanghai University* Shiya LinGuangdong University of Foreign Studies

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

Guangzhou, where English education receives substantial attention and its mother tongue, Cantonese, has developed a rich repertoire of English loanwords due to historical contact, provides a suitable context for examining how loanwords affect children’s acquisition of English stress at ages 8–10. However, this role has not been sufficiently addressed in existing research. This study will recruit 45 primary school students and employ 20 Cantonese-English loanwords together with sentence materials. Speech will be recorded, and stress patterns will be analyzed through both native-speaker judgments and acoustic measures, including F0, duration, and intensity. The research hypothesizes that the English stress production of Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual children (CME) will be native-like than that of Mandarin-English bilinguals (ME) and closer to that of English native speakers (ENS). The results are expected to reveal how the tone system of Cantonese influences English stress production in the case of loanwords, and how that task type jointly affects children’s ability to acquire stress patterns in English.

Keywords: Loanwords; phonological influence; children second language acquisition; Cantonese; stress
Published: November 19, 2025
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2025.HT30094
Volume: CHR Vol.97
pp. 158-167
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