Perceptual and phonotactic effects in loanword adaptation: English postvocalic stops in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

When an English word with a postvocalic stop is borrowed into Taiwan Mandarin (TM), because TM allows only nasal coda consonants, an often-used strategy to repair the illegality is vowel-insertion (e.g., Wood → [wu.tv̥]). Based on a corpus study of 335 English borrowed names, this trend is confirmed (76%). Among the deleted cases, an asymmetry of different places of articulation was found: Coronal stops are deleted most often (15%, e.g., Hollywood → [hau.lai.wu]), and dorsals more often than labials (12%, e.g., Titanic → [thiɛ.ta.ni] vs 0%, e.g., Jeep → [tɕ. phu]). Following Kang’s (2003) perceptual explanation, the tendency of coronal-deletion can be explained by the fact that postvocalic coronals are often unreleased and thus less perceptually salient to TM speakers. According to TIMIT corpus, the release rate of coronals, labials, and dorsals stops is 37%, 52%, and 83%, respectively (Kang, 2003). However, this cannot explain the reversed pattern of dorsals and labials. I propose that this is due to another factor: Labial coda is marked in TM since only [n] and [ŋ], but not [m], can occur in coda position. In other words, the deletion of postvocalic stops depends on the saliency that considers both perceptual and phonotactic factors.