I’m a huge supporter of increasing formal Cantonese instruction and am so glad to see research being done on Cantonese language acquisition. Good luck on finishing your thesis!

I took the survey and I had some concerns about research design come up while going through your questions. In the interest of providing some friendly support I wanted to pass those concerns on. Do with them what you will.

It’s a fair enough point to want to explore correlations between music knowledge and ability to learn tones, but you’re really not breaking the two different variables apart in your questions. You ask if the responder’s music background helps them learn tones. What background? How long did they study music? Did they learn with music? Where did they learn (HK vs UK for example)? How are they measuring their proficiency with tones?

In other words, you’re asking one or two survey questions to do far, far too much work in your analysis. I’d be really skeptical as a reader of any conclusions you draw from that question.

Hope that might give you some food for thought as you continue to work on the paper.