The relationship between the perception of non-native phonotactics and loanword adaptation

This study examines how phonetic details produced by non-bilingual borrowers (‘disseminators’) are categorised when new words are transmitted to the monolinguals of the borrowing language community (‘recipients’). The stimuli are based on research showing that the schwa inserted by English speakers into non-native clusters (e.g. /zgɑmo/→[z ə gɑmo]) differs acoustically from lexical schwa (e.g. [zəgɑmo]). In Experiment 1, listeners transcribed Cluster (CC), Lexical (CəC) and Transitional (C ə C) stimuli produced by an English speaker. Transcriptions of C ə C stimuli were split between CC and CVC, and participants wrote C ə C with a vowel less often than they did CəC. Experiment 2 demonstrated that listeners had difficulty discriminating between C ə C and both CC and CəC. These findings suggest that C ə C is acoustically intermediate between clusters and schwas; thus recipients may assign C ə C token to either of the phonotactic categories CC or CəC. The ramifications of these findings for loanwords and the acquisition of phonological contrast are discussed.