A Mandarin Chinese speaker from Beijing struggles to be understood in Guangzhou despite using correct vocabulary. Which mechanism explains this communication breakdown?

💡 Explanation

The speaker's accent hinders communication because the prosodic contour realization differs significantly between Beijing Mandarin and Cantonese. Prosodic features like tone sandhi are not correctly interpreted, therefore the Cantonese speaker struggles to understand the speaker from Beijing, rather than semantic or lexical processing failures being the cause.

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