An orthographic effect in loanword adaptation

Robert Daland, Mira Oh

Abstract


Loanword corpora have been an important tool in studying the relationship between speech perception and native-language phonotactics. Recent work has challenged this use of loanword corpora on methodological grounds, based on the fact that source and possibly loan orthography conditions the adaptation. The present study replicates and extends this finding by using information theory to quantify the relative strength of orthographic effects, in the adaptation of English vowels into Korean. It is found that the orthographic effect is strong for unstressed vowels, but almost unnoticable for stressed vowels. It is proposed that orthography plays a large role in adaptation only when the source form is perceptually compatible with multiple phonological parses in the borrowing language.

Keywords


loanword adaptation; korean; orthography; information theory

References


Boersma, Paul & Hamann, Silke (2009). Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception. In Calabrese, A. & W. Leo Wetzels (eds.), Loanword phonology, 11-58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Broselow, Ellen; Chen, Su-I; & Wang, Chilin (1998). The emergence of the unmarked in second language phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20, 261-280.

Davidson, Lisa (2007). The relationship between the perception of non-native phonotactics and loanword adaptation. Phonology 24, 261-286.

Dupoux, Emmanuel; Hirose, Yuki; Kakehi, Kazuhiku; Pallier, Christophe; & Mehler, Jacques (1999). Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: a perceptual illusion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25, 1568-1578.

Iverson, Gregory K. & Lee, Ahrong. (2006). Perception of contrast in Korean loanword adaptation. Korean Linguistics 13, 49-87.

Kabak, Baris & Idsardi, William J. (2007). Speech perception is not isomorphic to phonology: The case of perceptual epenthesis. Language and Speech 50, 23-52.

Kang, Yoonjung. (2003). Perceptual similarity in loanword adaptation: English postvocalic word-final stops in Korean. Phonology 20, 219-273. doi:10.1017/S0952675703004524

Kang, Yoonjung. (2010). The emergence of phonological adaptation from phonetic adaptation: English loanwords in Korean. Phonology 27, 225-253. doi:10.1017/S0952675710000114

Kwulipkwukeyenkwuwen [The National Academy for the Korean Language]. 1991. Oylaye sayong siltay cosa: 1990 nyendo [Survey of the state of loanword usage: 1990]. Seoul: NAKL.

Paradis, Darlene & LaCharite, Carole (2002). Addressing and disconfirming some predictions of phonetic approximation for loanword adaptation. Langues et Linguistique 28, 71-91.

Peperkamp, Sharon; Vendelin, Inga; & Nakamura, Kimihiro. (2008). On the perceptual origin of loanword adaptations: experimental evidence from Japanese. Phonology 25, 129-164.

Shannon, Claude E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27, pp. 379-423 & 623-656.

Shinohara, Sugito. (2004). Emergence of universal grammar in foreign word adaptation. In Kager, R., J. Pater, & W. Zonneveld (eds.), Fixing priorities: Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge University Press. 292-320.

Silverman, Daniel. (1992). Multiple scansions in loanword phonology: Evidence from Cantonese. Phonology 9, 298-328.

Vendelin, Inga & Peperkamp, Sharon (2006). The influence of orthography on loanword adaptations. Lingua 116, 996-1007.

Vinh, Nguyen X; Epps, Julien; & Bailey, James (2009). Information theoretic measures for clusterings comparison. In Meila, M. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning - ICML '09, pp. 2837-2854. doi:10.1145/1553374.1553511. ISBN 9781605585161.

Yip, Moira. (1993). Cantonese loanword phonology and Optimality Theory. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 2, 261-291.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v1i1.46

Copyright (c) 2014 Robert Daland, Mira Oh

License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/