When in doubt, read the instructions: Orthographic effects in loanword adaptation

Abstract

Loanword adaptation has yielded many insights into the relationship between speech perception and the phonological grammar. Evidence is now mounting that orthographic effects on loanword adaptation may be more prevalent than was once thought (cf. Paradis and LaCharité, 2002; Vendelin and Peperkamp, 2006), partially obscuring phonological effects. This paper investigates orthographic effects in the adaptation of vowels of English words loaned into Korean. Experiment I uses information-theoretic statistics, called the orthographic and perceptual information gains, to estimate a lower bound on the contribution of orthography and perception to vowel adaptation. The results suggest that orthography contributes more to the adaptation of unstressed vowels, while perception contributes more to the adaptation of stressed vowels. Experiment II considers the adaptation of the /ɛ/∼/æ/ contrast; these vowels have merged recently in Korean although the orthographic distinction is maintained. The paper concludes by proposing the Perceptual Uncertainty Hypothesis: source-loan orthographic alignment plays the greatest role in constraining loanword adaptation when phonological parsing in the borrowing language is underdetermined by perceptual factors alone.