Back Vowels Research Articles

Human Frequency Following Response

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) typically experience reduced speech perception, which is not completely restored with amplification. This likely occurs because cochlear damage, in addition to elevating audiometric thresholds, alters the neural representation of speech transmitted to higher centers along the auditory neuroaxis. While the deleterious effects of SNHL on speech perception in humans have been well-documented using behavioral paradigms, our understanding of the neural correlates underlying these perceptual deficits remains limited. Using the scalp-recorded frequency following response (FFR), the authors examine the effects of SNHL and aging on subcortical neural representation of acoustic features important for pitch and speech perception, namely the periodicity envelope (F0) and temporal fine structure (TFS; formant structure), as reflected in the phase-locked neural activity generating the FFR. FFRs were obtained from 10 listeners with normal hearing (NH) and 9 listeners with mild-moderate SNHL in response to a steady-state English back vowel /u/ presented at multiple intensity levels. Use of multiple presentation levels facilitated comparisons at equal sound pressure level (SPL) and equal sensation level. In a second follow-up experiment to address the effect of age on envelope and TFS representation, FFRs were obtained from 25 NH and 19 listeners with mild to moderately severe SNHL to the same vowel stimulus presented at 80 dB SPL. Temporal waveforms, Fast Fourier Transform and spectrograms were used to evaluate the magnitude of the phase-locked activity at F0 (periodicity envelope) and F1 (TFS). Neural representation of both envelope (F0) and TFS (F1) at equal SPLs was stronger in NH listeners compared with listeners with SNHL. Also, comparison of neural representation of F0 and F1 across stimulus levels expressed in SPL and sensation level (accounting for audibility) revealed that level-related changes in F0 and F1 magnitude were different for listeners with SNHL compared with listeners with NH. Furthermore, the degradation in subcortical neural representation was observed to persist in listeners with SNHL even when the effects of age were controlled for. Overall, our results suggest a relatively greater degradation in the neural representation of TFS compared with periodicity envelope in individuals with SNHL. This degraded neural representation of TFS in SNHL, as reflected in the brainstem FFR, may reflect a disruption in the temporal pattern of phase-locked neural activity arising from altered tonotopic maps and/or wider filters causing poor frequency selectivity in these listeners. Finally, while preliminary results indicate that the deleterious effects of SNHL may be greater than age-related degradation in subcortical neural representation, the lack of a balanced age-matched control group in this study does not permit us to completely rule out the effects of age on subcortical neural representation.

Poireaux ‘puerros’ y poire ‘pera’: una diptongación poco conocida de la o abierta en galorromance septentrional

Yves Charles Morin analyzes a common form of diphthongization that affected unstressed non-low back vowels in some dialects of Northern Gallo-Romance. Contrary to the traditional view, he argues that the diphthong of poireau resulted from a genuine sound change that developed in the Paris region in ways similar to, but historically independent from, the diphthongization observed in Southern Picardy and Western Normandy.

Lithuanian root list by Cynthia M. Vakareliyska

Reviewed by: Lithuanian root list by Cynthia M. Vakareliyska Peter Arkadiev Cynthia M. Vakareliyska. Lithuanian root list. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2015. ii + 91 pp. ISBN 9780893574475. Lithuanian root list by Cynthia Vakareliyska is a welcome publication, in that probably for the first time in English, it presents the basic elements of Lithuanian word formation, i.e., roots and affixal morphemes with their variants, in a systematic and fairly comprehensive fashion. The book consists of a short introduction (1–6) outlining the purposes of the root list, describing the most common phonological and morphophonemic rules affecting the shape of morphemes as well as the methodology of presentation of the material. The central part of the book is the root list itself (7–64), containing about 2,000 Lithuanian roots and root variants in alphabetical order. There follows a comprehensive list of the common derivational affixes (65–85) arranged according to the part-of-speech (noun, adjective, verb) they derive, including both suffixes and prefixes with their basic meanings or functions and, importantly, information about the accentuation of the respective derivatives. The book closes with a concise glossary of linguistic terms for nonlinguists (86–90) and a short list of references (91). It is worth noting, as the author herself does on page 1 of the introduction, that the root list provides the synchronic forms and meanings of roots disregarding etymological information. Therefore, it is not surprising that having abstracted away from the more or less automatic morphophonological processes affecting the shapes of roots, such as, e.g., palatalization or “mutation” of the final consonant before certain suffixes (e.g., rýt-as ‘morning’ ~ pùs-ryči-ai ‘breakfast’, lit. ‘half-morning-ers’), Vakareliyska lists (sometimes in the same entry, sometimes in different entries) root variants related by such nonautomatic processes as ablaut (e.g., skand- ‘sink, drown’ ~ skend- ‘submerge, drown’), nasal infixation (e.g., gud-, gund- ‘accustom’), or synchronically opaque final consonant variation (e.g., moj-, mos- ‘wave’). This is perfectly justified given that such variants, which for some roots are quite numerous (e.g., svar- ‘weigh, weight’, svarb- ‘important’, sver-, svėr-, svor- ‘weigh’ ~ svir-, svyr- ‘bend, hang’), tend to develop their own meanings, often lexicalized in combination with certain derivational affixes. All in all, the book is certainly useful, both for students of Lithuanian, for whom it facilitates breaking up polymorphemic words of Lithuanian into their constituent parts and recognition of the sometimes fairly complex relations [End Page 393] between words, as well as for scholars, who now have an opportunity to make synchronic generalizations about Lithuanian roots and their variants, as well as derivational affixes (though for scientific purposes a reverse index of roots would also be welcome). The general criticism that is possible to level at this book concerns the lack of explicit criteria for the choice of material and the somewhat inconsistent use of those criteria, which are spelled out in the introduction. Starting with the introduction itself, the list of the common ablaut patterns attested in verbal inflection (2) crucially lacks the pattern e-e-e: (kélti : kẽlia : kė́lė ‘raise’); there also is no reference to the nonautomatic lengthening of the stressed /a/ and /æ/ (perhaps because this is not reflected in the orthography). The description on page 2 (repeated on 89) of the alternation illustrated above by the pair rýtas ~ pùsryčiai is at best inaccurate if not entirely misleading, since as it implies that any t, d “mutates” to č, dž “before a back vowel,” while in reality this “mutation” occurs only in positions where an etymological *j preceded the back vowel. It cannot be formulated without reference to the so-called “soft” inflectional classes and “palatalizing” derivational suffixes. The formulation on the same page that nasals “can drop before obstruents” is also inaccurate. Nasals never drop before stops and systematically drop before fricatives and affricates (with a number of well-defined exceptions). The characterization of the so-called “grave accent” as “falling” (3) is inadequate, since this accent sign is no more than a purely graphic marker of stress on short syllables. Moreover, speaking about “tones” in Lithuanian is an outdated and ill-informed practice, which...

Conditioned Sound Changes in the Rapanui Language

This paper presents several conditioned sound changes in the Rapanui language: replacement of rhotics with glottal stops in the final syllable, further loss of glottal stops in polymoraic words, retention of Proto-Polynesian *h in certain phonetic contexts, metathesis of consonants in adjacent syllables, dissimilation of velar nasals in the vicinity of velar stops, and assimilation of central and back vowels. The sound changes under discussion systematically distinguish between bimoraic and polymoraic lexical roots and some of them also distinguish between lexical and grammatical morphemes. Some of the sound changes are recent and operate on borrowings from Tahitian and European languages. This paper also provides new information on the phonology of Rapanui and, by extension, the Eastern Polynesian subgroup. The findings imply that, in the case of Rapanui, a phonological description would not be satisfactory without an account of productive recent and on-going sound changes.

Variability of Acoustic Features of Hypernasality and it’s Assessment

Hypernasality (HP) is observed across voiced phonemes uttered by Cleft-Palate (CP) speakers with defective velopharyngeal (VP) opening. HP assessment using signal processing technique is challenging due to the variability of acoustic features across various conditions such as speakers, speaking style, speaking rate, severity of HP etc. Most of the study for hypernasality (HP) assessment is based on isolated sustained vowels under laboratory conditions. We measure the variability of acoustic features and detect HP using vowel /i/, /a/ and /u/ in continuous read speech with gradually increasing severity of HP of CP speakers. Linear predictive coding (LPC) method is used for acoustic feature extraction. In first part of our study, we observe the variation in acoustic parameters within and across vowel category with gradually increasing HP. We observe that inter-speaker variability in spectral features among CP subjects for vowel /i/ is 0.96, /a/ has 1.13 and vowel /u/ has 2.05. The inter-speaker variability measurement suggests that high back vowel /u/ is mostly affected and has the highest variability. High front vowel /i/ is least affected and has the lowest variability with HP. In the second part, ratio of vowel space area (VSA) of hypernasal and normal speech is calculated and used as a measure for HP detection. We observe that VSA spanned by CP subjects is 0.65 times less than isolated uttered Bangla nasal VSA and 0.43 times less than read speech uttered English oral VSA.

A Study on the Modern Vietnam-Chinese [k/c] and [ŋ/ɲ] Sounds in the Coda Position

This study aimed to investigate the phonological conditions of the palatal consonants (c/ɲ) which de- rive from the velar consonants (k/ŋ) in the coda position in Vietnamese-Chinese sounds. These conditions were expected to be different from those of both Middle Chinese and Korean-Chinese sounds. For this study, the Middle Chinese and Korean-Chinese sounds were compared and contrasted. The research results showed the fol- lowing: First, in Vietnamese-Chinese sounds, the palatal consonants (c/ɲ) appeared in the back position of front vowels (i/e). Second, the coda of Vietnamese-Chinese appeared with both (c/ɲ) (palatal) and (k/ŋ) (velar) after the vowel (a), while the coda of Vietnamese appeared with (ae, ɐ, iɐ, Iɛ) (Middle Chinese sounds) as well as Middle Chinese back vowels (ɑ, ɔ). Third, the coda of Vietnamese-Chinese palatal sounds appeared when the semivowel (j) was pronounced either after or before the core vowels in Middle Korean-Chinese sounds. Therefore, the most frequent Vietnamese-Chinese sounds in the coda position were (ɛ) or (jə) similar to the modern Korean-Chinese sounds. Consequently the (ɛ) in modern Korean changed from the Middle Korean sounds (aj), (ʌj), which may help to infer that the coda of Vietnamese contains the semivowel (j).

Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels

Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a greater degree of carryover than anticipatory nasalization. Nasality in carryover contexts is nonetheless restricted: the oral–nasal contrast is neutralized for high back vowels in this context and realized for three of the six speakers in low vowels. In the absence of nasal consonant context, contrastive vowel nasalization is generally greatest late in the vowel. Low nasal vowels in carryover contexts parallel this pattern (despite the location of the nasal consonantbeforethe vowel), and low nasal vowels in anticipatory contexts are most nasal at the start of the vowel. We relate the synchronic patterns of coarticulation in Lakota to both its system of contrast and diachronic processes in the evolution of nasality in Lakota. These data reflect that coarticulatory patterns, as well as contrastive patterns, are grammatical and controlled by speakers.

He Says Potato, She Says Potahto: Young Infants Track Talker-Specific Accents

ABSTRACTOne of the most fundamental aspects of learning a language is determining the mappings between words and referents. An often-overlooked complication is that infants interact with multiple individuals who may not produce words in the same way. In the present study, we explored whether 10- to 12-month-olds can use talker-specific knowledge to infer the intended referents of novel labels. During exposure, infants heard two talkers whose front vowels differed; one talker trained them on a word-referent mapping. At test, infants saw the trained object and a novel object; they heard a single novel label from both talkers. When the label had a front vowel (Experiment 1), infants responded differently as a function of talker, but when it had a back vowel (Experiment 2), they did not, mapping the novel label to the novel object for both talkers. These results suggest that infants can track the phonetic properties of two simultaneously presented talkers and use information about each talker’s previous productions to guide their referential interpretations.

Taro or Oyster? The production merger of the two mid back vowels, [o] and [ɔ], in a major dialect of Taiwan Southern Min

Abstract One of the two major dialects of Taiwaesen Southern Min [TSM] has two mid back vowels, /o/ and / ɔ/. This distinction is well documented in classic Chinese phonology and agreed upon by most TSM linguists. However, an increasing number of recent evidence-based studies have reported the falling together of these two vowels and, indeed, many non-linguists as well have noticed the loss of the distinction. Since these two vowels are so similar in nearly all phonetic features most studies carried out heretofore which concluded that the merger had in fact taken place were based on auditory criteria. The present study, however, the methodology of which has been designed to take account of the low literacy rate of TSM speakers, as well as the frequent contact which takes place between TSM dialects, investigates the status of these two vowels making use of both acoustic and statistical data. Results indicate that in TSM /o/ and / ɔ / have merged in the case of younger speakers. Both internal and external factors are proposed which have affected the merger, and the further suggestion is put forward that, though the instance of sound shift reversal in Taiwan is on record, this is not likely to occur in the case of TSM /o/ and / ɔ /.

The Plautdietsch Vowel Shift Across Space and Time

This paper provides an account of the long vowel shift currently underway in the trans-statal Plautdietsch speech community. Placement of the shift within Labov’s typology of vowel shifts reveals a commonly overlooked development in Plautdietsch vowel movement, namely the centralization of mid-high back vowels which must have occurred before the breakup of the community into New and Old World groups. Shared centralization prompted both groups to have similar developments in the back vowel space after they were no longer geographically contiguous and prompted many groups to undergo centralization in the front vowel space. This case study reveals a pattern of innovation in which separation from parent communities fosters linguistic innovations in daughter communities. These innovations occur irrespective of the traditional Molotschna or Chortitza dialect affiliation of the daughter colonies in question.

Communicating product size using sound and shape symbolism

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate children’s perception of a product’s physical attribute (size) when presented with brand elements (brand name and brand logo) manipulated using sound and shape symbolism principles (brand name sounds and brand logo shape), across children of different developmental ages. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship between sounds and shapes was examined in a pilot study. A 2 × 2 experiment was then undertaken to examine the effect of brand name characteristics (front vowel sound versus back vowel sound) and brand logo design (angular versus curved) on children’s (from 5 to 12 years) product-related judgments. Findings – Older children use non-semantic brand stimuli as a means to infer physical product attributes. Specifically, only older children are able to perceive a product to be smaller (larger) when the product is paired with a brand name containing a front (back) vowel sound or an angular (curved) brand logo (single symbolic cue). We illustrate that brand logo-related shape symbolism effects are weaker and appear later in age when compared with brand name-related sound symbolism effects. Further, younger children are able to infer product attribute meaning when exposed to two symbolic cues (that is, brand name and brand logo). Practical implications – When selecting an inventive brand element, consideration should be given to the relationship between the vowel sounds contained in a brand’s name and product attributes, and also the shape of the brand’s logo and product attributes. Originality/value – This is the first experiment undertaken to examine the combination of brand name- and brand logo-related symbolism effects in the context of children. We demonstrate that age-based bounds may be overcome through the provision of multiple symbolic cues.

Duration reflexes of syllable structure in Mandarin

Recent discussions of Mandarin phonology have appealed to various aspects of phonetic duration as support for hypotheses concerning the structure of the syllable. But the actual empirical evidence for these claims is based on early studies typically conducted with a limited number of speakers (often just one) using varied methods of data collection and analysis. This paper provides a more firm empirical foundation for various durational reflections of the Mandarin syllable based on the analysis of 960 monosyllabic words recorded by five female speakers. Our main findings are as follows. We find no statistically significant difference between CV and CVN syllables, supporting the bimoraic analysis of the former. We replicate the Tone 3>Tone 2>Tone 1>Tone 4 duration hierarchy of earlier studies with a larger variety of syllable types. Relative to CV syllables, the nuclear vowel is shortened in both CGV and CVN structures suggesting that the prenuclear glide is associated to the syllable rhyme. The vowel is shortest in CGVN syllables supporting the analysis of the Cjan>Cjen low vowel raising process as motivated by phonetic undershoot. Finally, in Cuan syllables the nuclear vowel's backness is determined more by the coda than the prenuclear glide.

ADVERTISING BRANDS BY MEANS OF SOUNDS SYMBOLISM: THE INFLUENCE OF VOWELS ON PERCEIVED BRAND CHARACTERISTICS

The aim of this study is to test the influence of sound symbolism on perceived characteristics of a brand as well as to highlight the importance of applied social psychology to current practice of advertising. Previous research showed that the phonetic structure of brand name communicates its characteristics, i.e. it drives consumers to assess certain features and performance of the product. I assumed that when consumers encounter an unknown brand name, they automatically infer characteristics from the meaning conveyed by the sounds (e.g. phonemes). Therefore, I supposed that a brand name for a shampoo (artificially created on experimental purpose) containing back vowel is evaluated better by consumers when they compare it to another brand name with front vowels. Furthermore, for the accuracy of responses, I used the semantic differential scale to measure the differences between two brands in terms of certain attributes of product. To this end, fifty students (N=50) participated in a research based on questionnaire. As the results of the current research showed, the brand name with back vowel outnumbered the brand name with front vowel on two dimension, i.e. on brand activity and brand efficiency. The brand name containing front vowel was rated better when subjects evaluated the product in generally. Last, but not least, when it comes to convey meanings, the sound of back vowels [a] could be used more when marketers promote products that communicate its characteristics such as efficiency, velocity and health. The back vowel could be also assessed to products with larger packing or special sailing such as extra quantity. Meanwhile, the brand names with front vowels [ie] could be created for more expensive products with good quality, mainly addressed to men.

Processos de assimilação envolvendo as consoantes oclusivas dentais /t,d/ no português brasileiro

The major aim of this paper is to present, based on quantitative sociolinguistics, a analyse of the process of progressive assimilation that involve the dental stop consonants. First of all, one overview about the regressive assimilation, which was extensively studied in Brazilian Portuguese, will be present. Then, the contexts of progressive assimilation in the speech community of Itabaiana-PB will be analyzed. The motivation for this paper is the fact that, in the dialect from Itabaiana, the process of progressive assimilation, in words such as muito ‘many/much’ and gosto ‘like”, in which the preceding phonological context exerts influence over the following one, tend to undergo the process of regressive assimilation, such as as pote ‘pot’ and bote ‘boat’, more useful when we think about the Brazilian Portuguese. The theoretical approach underlying the research is the variation theory, or quantitative Sociolinguistics, pioneered by William Labov (1972). The data collected had already been electronically stored in the corpus from Projeto Variacao Linguistica da Paraiba – VALPB. The sample consists of 36 informants from the community, being stratified according to gender, age group and years of schooling. As result, the computer program Goldvarb (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005) pointed as favorite to the application of the rule: the gender (male gender), the level of schooling (no scholar historic since the primary), the following phonological context (high back vowel), the precedent phonological context (monophthong), and the tonicity (post-stressed syllable).

London's Name

AbstractThe present paper was inspired by Richard Coates's 1998 article ‘A new analysis of the name London’, in which he refutes the traditional derivation of the name from the form Londinium recorded in the Classical sources on the grounds that its Old English ancestor Lunden presupposes a British (that is to say, Celtic) source form *[Lōndonjon] with a back vowel in the second syllable. I wish further to clarify the history of this name in two respects by showing that: (i) the British name must have reached western Germanic dialects prior to West Germanic Consonant Lengthening and thus in all probability prior to the Anglo‐Saxon settlements in England, and: (ii) that *Londonion (with a short [o]) belongs to an identifiable British place‐name type, even though the lexical base lond‐ remains rather elusive and information on a native settlement is confined to a single historical source, which locates it to the south of the Thames.

Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift

AbstractAddressing the dearth of variation research in nonurban, noncoastal regions of California, this study examines the extent to which speakers in Redding, an inland community just north of the Central Valley, participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). We acoustically analyze the fronting of the back vowels boot and boat, the raising of ban and backing of bat, and the merger of bot and bought, in sociolinguistic interviews with 30 white lifelong residents. Results reveal a change in apparent time for all analyzed variables, indicating the CVS's progression through the community, though not as robust as in urban, coastal areas. Additionally, we provide evidence that shifting patterns for different vowels are structured by the ideological divide between town and country. Thus, as the CVS spreads through Redding, speakers utilize particular features of the shift differently, negotiating identities relevant in California's nonurban locales.

CV coarticulation, locus and locus equation perspective on the invariance issue involving Algerian Arabic consonants

The aim of the present investigation is to strengthen the link between coarticulation and locus theory of speech perception through the analysis and discrimination of six Algerian Arabic consonants [b], [d], [ɡ], [q], [ʕ], [h] representing respectively six places of articulation: labial, alveolar, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, laryngeal. When plotting the error area of the categories formed by (F2onset, F3onset) samples within a CV syllable across all speakers against the F2 transition extent mean(abs(F2onset–F2vowel)), a linear correlation is observed. Then a formula for the degree of coarticulation is derived from this straight line and it is shown that it is more reliable than the slope of the locus line. When combined with the locus equation's linearity, another equation is obtained and appears to be well fitted with locus theory. Another observation in our data concerns the deviation of syllables with respect to the locus line, as in the previously noted case of [ɡ] with back vowels. Moreover, it is shown that these shifts are speaker dependent and a consequence of interactions between the categories cited above. Finally, it is shown how better place separation is obtained when these categories are mapped in the auditor's perception space using the modified locus equation.

Latent semantics of action verbs reflect phonetic parameters of intensity and emotional content.

Conjuring up our thoughts, language reflects statistical patterns of word co-occurrences which in turn come to describe how we perceive the world. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or extracting eigenvectors from term document matrices made up of Wikipedia lines and Shakespeare plots, the resulting latent semantics capture not only the associative links which form concepts, but also spatial dimensions embedded within the surface structure of language. As both the shape and movements of objects have been found to be associated with phonetic contrasts already in toddlers, this study explores whether articulatory and acoustic parameters may likewise differentiate the latent semantics of action verbs. Selecting 3 × 20 emotion-, face-, and hand-related verbs known to activate premotor areas in the brain, their mutual cosine similarities were computed using latent semantic analysis LSA, and the resulting adjacency matrices were compared based on two different large scale text corpora: HAWIK and TASA. Applying hierarchical clustering to identify common structures across the two text corpora, the verbs largely divide into combined mouth and hand movements versus emotional expressions. Transforming the verbs into their constituent phonemes, and projecting them into an articulatory space framed by tongue height and formant frequencies, the clustered small and large size movements appear differentiated by front versus back vowels corresponding to increasing levels of arousal. Whereas the clustered emotional verbs seem characterized by sequences of close versus open jaw produced phonemes, generating up- or downwards shifts in formant frequencies that may influence their perceived valence. Suggesting, that the latent semantics of action verbs reflect parameters of intensity and emotional polarity that appear correlated with the articulatory contrasts and acoustic characteristics of phonemes.

Articulation of vowel height in Taiwanese Vowels: An EMA study

Whalen et al.’s (2010) ultrasound study has suggested that constriction degree “may be the best descriptor for height” in American English front vowels {i, ɪ, e, ɛ}. The present study took a further step, investigating the case of height and backness distinction in Taiwanese front and back vowels. Stimuli consisted in /CV/ sequences with V corresponding to one of the six vowels {i, e, a, ɔ, ɣ, u} (Southern variety). Five adult speakers were asked to repeat each sequence six times in random order. The articulatory data were collected using the Carstens AG500 EMA system. Our results show that vowel height and backness in Taiwanese vowels can be reliably differentiated as follows: (1) for front and central vowels, height is primarily distinguished by Tongue Body Constriction Degree (TBCD) (i>e>a) (less robustly by Tongue Tip Constriction Degree), whereas height distinction of back vowels is made in Tongue Dorsum Constriction Degree (TDCD) (u>ɣ>ɔ), (2) backness can be distinguished by Tongue Tip and Tongue Body Constriction Location. Therefore, Whalen et al.’s (2010) claim can be extended to back vowels as well (at least in Taiwanese). Furthermore, our results are compatible with Ladefoged’s (2001) “holistic” view of vowel height as long as his “highest point of the tongue” can be “locally” interpreted: TBCD for height of front and central vowels and TDCD for back vowels. In sum, the present study suggests that distinction in vowel height be relativized to different gestural constriction degree.

Mapping vowels from American English to Taiwanese Mandarin: A perceptual study

It has been noted that vowel backness is largely preserved in English-to-Mandarin loanwords, but not vowel height. This asymmetry contradicts the native phonological patterns. The aim of this study is to re-examine this issue from an experimental perspective. Ten Taiwanese Mandarin (TM) speakers (aged 23–30) participated in this experiment. English Stimuli consisted in /CVmi/ sequences with C corresponding to one of the three consonants {b, d, g} and with V to one of the four vowels {ɛ, ɔ, æ, ɚ}. Mandarin stimuli also consisted in /CVmi/ sequences with C corresponding to one of the three consonants {p, t, k} and with V to one of the following vowels {i, a, u, ei, ie, au, ou, uo}. The participants were asked to rate similarity between American English and TM vowels (on scale 1–7). Our results partially support the generalizations in loanword adaptation, namely that TM speakers tend to map English [æ] onto Mandarin [ei], rather than [a], while [ɔ] is mapped to [ou/uo], [ɛ] to [ei], and [ɚ] to [ɣ]. We further measured the perceptual distance between English and Mandarin vowels by means of Euclidean distance. Given the assumption that smaller acoustic distance means greater perceptual similarity, it turned out that only this pair (English [ɚ] and Mandarin [ɣ]) can be explained away. It is thus concluded that loanword adaptation is not entirely based on raw acoustic signals. Phonological features and phonotactics also play a significant role.