Perception of foreign segments in loanword phonology

Abstract

One puzzle in loanword adaptation involves a situation in which a foreign sound structure is modified even when the original form would be phonotactically legal in the borrowing language. An example of this apparently unnecessary repair is the tendency to insert a vowel after a word-final stop in English borrowed words into Korean since Korean native words can end in a stop. This study investigates the effects of different linguistic factors, i.e., release and voicing of the English final stop and tenseness of pre-stop vowel, on the likelihood of vowel insertion to determine whether this unmotivated vowel insertion derives from the misperception of English words. The current study separates out the effects of these linguistic factors in a perception experiment designed to help in testing the hypotheses of the adaptation-in-perception approach. In the categorization task, Korean listeners heard English nonwords ending in a stop or in a stop-vowel sequence and categorized each word as consonant-final or vowel-final. Although the present results concerning the main effects of all factors are compatible with the adaptation-in-perception approach, the interaction effects between stop voicing and vowel tenseness suggest that alongside the phonological factors that were considered in this study, other possible factors may play a role in loanword adaptation, e.g., maintaining perceptual similarity in production, stop place, word size, and final syllable containing stress. This indicates that unnecessary vowel insertion is not a straightforward outcome that happens in adaptation but an intricate linguistic phenomenon that involves the complex interaction of perception, production and several other factors.