Can non-natives outperform natives on speech discrimination? Surprisingly, Cantonese listeners discriminated English stress more accurately than did English listeners. To ascertain its generalizability, I further ask whether this Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination is equally potent across pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. Sixty Cantonese and English listeners completed four blocks of English stress discrimination task with varying pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. In the absence of rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction, the Cantonese listeners outperformed the English listeners on English stress discrimination. However, the Cantonese advantage disappeared when either rising pitch accent pattern or vowel reduction was present. When both rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction were present, the Cantonese listeners even performed poorer than the English listeners. The findings underscore two constraints of the Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination—rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction. Based on collective research on non-native advantage in speech perception, the Acoustic-Attentional-Contextual hypothesis is proposed.

非本地人在语言歧视上能胜过本地人吗？令人惊讶的是，粤语听众比英语听众更准确地辨别英语重音。为了确定它的普遍性，我进一步询问粤语在英语重音辨别方面的优势是否在音高重音和元音减少的情况下同样有效。60 名粤语和英语听众完成了四组英语重读任务，包括不同的音高重音和元音减少上下文。在没有升调重音模式和元音减少的情况下，粤语听众在英语重音辨别方面的表现优于英语听众。然而，当出现音高重音模式或元音减少时，粤语的优势就消失了。当同时存在升调重音模式和元音减少时，粤语听众的表现甚至比英语听众差。研究结果强调了粤语在英语重音辨别方面的优势的两个限制因素——升调重音模式和元音减少。在对语言感知中非母语优势的集体研究的基础上，提出了声-注意-语境假说。