06 Nov 2001

Cristine Haunz

When foreign words enter a borrowing language, they often undergo drastic changes. Sounds of the input word can be changed, or deleted, and epenthetic vowels can break up illegal clusters. These processes have been viewed as a valuable source of information about what happens when two phonologies clash. The main focus of loanword research to date has been on how and why the representation of the borrowed word is changed as a result of this clash.

However, little attention has been paid to the perception process that creates this representation from the acoustic input that the speaker hears. Where perception has been mentioned, it has either been claimed to be universal und thus perceiving all foreign sounds without difficulty (Jacobs and Gussenhoven 1999), or to be strictly limited to the native system for mono- as well as bilingual speakers (Silverman 1992, Yip 1993). As speech perception research shows that L2 learners do have difficulty with foreign sounds, but often improve greatly over time, both these positions are untenable.

Experiments are therefore under way to test the discrimination and identification abilities of speakers in the perception of those foreign sounds that are adapted in loanwords. This will examine to what extent, if any, adaptations may take place in (mis)perception rather than at a different level. Cases of interest are Spanish adaptations of the high front and back vowels of English (assimilation in perception or at a different stage?), Hindi adaptations of the English interdental fricative and alveolar stop (counter to phonetic similarity), and French perception of the English dental fricative depending on context (a possible influence of phonotactics in perception).

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