In automatic tone language recognition, lexical tone identification forms an integral part of the recognition process. In this paper, automatic recognition of Cantonese lexical tone in connected speech is tackled. Cantonese is a commonly used Chinese dialect and is very rich in tones. Data for this study are from a male native speaker of Cantonese. The study proceeds in 3 stages. Stage 1 studies the feasibility of lexical tone recognition using manually segmented F0 contours. Stage 2 is concerned with the design of a novel approach in automatic segmentation of F0 contours. Stage 3 develops a lexical tone recognition algorithm using automatically extracted F0 contours. Preliminary results show that for a fully automatic system, a tone recognition rate of 72.1 % (N=725) is achieved for connected speech.