This study examines the merger situation of the two rising tones in the comprehension and production of 15 speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese. The result shows that most of them differentiated the two rising tones in both comprehension and production. Only few speakers exhibited changes in their rising tones. Regarding the direction of change, in the comprehension of citation forms, the speakers who merged the two rising tones unanimously identified the low-rising word ji 'ear' as a high-rising word; in production, the two rising tones were merged in both directions. Moreover, the merger of the rising tones in citation forms was more prominent. Last, from the perspective of lexical diffusion, there were more citation forms and compound forms of the high-rising tone that were merged to the low-rising tone than those of the low-rising tone that were merged to the high-rising tone.
