Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations
A reassessment of English vowels in French
Sharon Peperkamp | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Paris
The question of whether loanword adaptation is based on phonological or phonetic proximity has been widely debated. Focusing on the adaptation of English vowels in French, I argue that on-line adaptations are based on perceived phonetic proximity, which is influenced by co-articulatory information. A perception experiment assessed French listeners’ perception of English vowels presented both within and spliced out of CVC syllables; the results were compared to the on-line adaptations of the same vowels in the same consonantal contexts produced previously by French speakers (Vendelin & Peperkamp 2006). Vowel identification in the two conditions differed, and the on-line adaptations are reflected more closely by the condition with vowels presented in context. These results support the hypothesis that on-line adaptations are based on phonetic, not phonological, proximity. They also show that phonetic variability due to coarticulation influences perception and hence that consonantal context should be controlled for in cross-linguistic vowel comparisons.
References
Best, Catherine T
1995 “
A Direct Realist View of Cross-Language Speech Perception”.
Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in cross-language research ed. by
Winifred Strange, 171-204. Baltimore, Md.: York Press.
Best, Catherine T
2015 “
Devil or Angel in the Details?: Perceiving phonetic variation as information about phonological structure”. This volume.
Best, Catherine T. & Michael D. Tyler
Bohn, Ocke-Schwen & Catherine T. Best
2012 “
Native-Language Phonetic and Phonological Influences on Perception of American English Approximants by Danish and German Listeners”.
Journal of Phonetics 40:1.109-128.
Delattre, Pierre
1981 “
An Acoustic and Articulatory Study of Vowel Reduction in Four Languages”.
Pierre Delattre: Studies in comparative phonetics ed. by
Bertil Malmberg, 63-93. Heidelberg: Julius Groos.
Delattre, Pierre, Alvin M. Liberman, Franklin S. Cooper & Louis J. Gerstman
1952 “
An Experimental Study of the Acoustic Determinants of Vowel Color: Observations on one- and two-formant vowels synthesized from spectrographic patterns”.
Word 8:3.195-210.
Escudero, Paola, Ellen Simon & Hoeger Mitterer
2012 “
The Perception of English Front Vowels by North Holland and Flemish Listeners: Acoustic similarity predicts and explains cross-linguistic and L2 perception”.
Journal of Phonetics 40:2.280-288.
Flege, James E
1995 “
Second Language Speech Learning: Theory, findings, and problems”.
Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in cross-language research ed. by
Winifred Strange, 233-277. Baltimore, Md.: York Press.
Flege, James E., Naoyuki Takagi & Virginia Mann
1996 “
Lexical Familiarity and English-Language Experience Affect Japanese Adults’ Perception of /ɹ/ and /l/”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 99:2.1161-1173.
Fox, Robert A., James E. Flege & Murray J. Munro
1995 “
The Perception of English and Spanish Vowels by Native English and Spanish Listeners”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97:4.2540-2551.
Fujisaki, Hiroya & Takashi Kawashima
1968 “
The Roles of Pitch and Higher Formants in the Perception of Vowels”.
IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics 16:1.73-77.
Hallé, Pierre, Catherine T. Best & Andrea Levitt
1999 “
Phonetic vs. Phonological Influences on French Listeners’ Perception of American English Approximants”.
Journal of Phonetics 27:3.281-306.
Hillenbrand, James M., Michael J. Clark & Robert A. Houde
2000 “
Some Effects of Duration on Vowel Recognition”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108:6.3013-3022.
Hillenbrand, James M., Michael J. Clark & Terrance M. Nearey
2001 “
Effects of Consonant Environment on Vowel Formant Patterns”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109:2.748-763.
Hillenbrand, James M. & Terrance M. Nearey
1999 “
Identification of Resynthesized /hVd/ Utterances: Effects of formant contour”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 105:6.3509-3523.
Huang, Caroline B-Y
1991 An Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Vowel Formant Trajectories in American English. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kang, Yoonjung
2003 “
Perceptual Similarity in Loanword Adaptation: English postvocalic word-final stops in Korean”.
Phonology 20:2.219-273.
Kang, Yoonjung
2011 “
Loanword Phonology”.
The Blackwell Companion to Phonology ed. by
Marc van Oostendorp,
Colin J. Ewen,
Elizabeth V. Hume &
Keren Rice, vol. IV, 2258-2281. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kim, Soohee & Emily Curtis
2002 “
Phonetic Duration of English /s/ and its Borrowing in Korean”.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics 10 ed. by
Noriko M. Akatsuka &
Susan Strauss, 406-419. Palo Alto, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
LaCharité, Darlene & Carole Paradis
2005 “
Category Preservation and Proximity versus Phonetic Approximation in Loanword Adaptation”.
Linguistic Inquiry 36:2.223-258.
Levy, Erika S
2009 “
On the Assimilation-Discrimination Relationship in American English Adults’ French Vowel Learning”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126:5.2670-2682.
Levy, Erika S. & Winifred Strange
2008 “
Perception of French Vowels by American English Adults with and without French Language Experience”.
Journal of Phonetics 36:1.141-157.
Lindblom, Bjorn E. F. & Michael Studdert-Kennedy
1967 “
On the Role of Formant Transitions in Vowel Recognition”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 42:4.830-843.
Mahalanobis, Prasanta C
1936 “
On the Generalised Distance in Statistics”.
Proceedings of the National Institute of Sciences of India
2, 49-55.
Manuel, Sharon
1999 “
Cross-Language Studies: Relating language-particular coarticulation patterns to other language-particular facts”.
Coarticulation: Theory, data and techniques ed. by
William J. Hardcastle &
Nigel Hewlett, 179-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Pierre
2002 “
Le système vocalique du français du Québec: De l’acoustique à la phonologie”.
La Linguistique 38.71-88.
Miller, Ralph. L
1953 “
Auditory Tests with Synthetic Vowels”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25:1.114-121.
Nearey, Terrance M. & Peter F. Assmann
1986 “
Modeling the Role of Vowel Inherent Spectral Change in Vowel Identification”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80:5.1297-1308.
Oh, Eunjin
2002 “
Fronting of Back Vowels in Coronal Contexts: A cross-language study”.
Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 8.239-254.
Paradis, Carole & Darlene LaCharité
1997 “
Preservation and Minimality in Loanword Adaptation”.
Journal of Linguistics 33:2.379-430.
Peperkamp, Sharon, Inga Vendelin & Kimihiro Nakamura
2008 “
On the Perceptual Origin of Loanword Adaptations: Experimental evidence from Japanese”.
Phonology 25:1.129-164.
Pols, Louis C. W., Leo J. T. van der Kamp & Reinier Plomp
1969 “
Perceptual and Physical Space of Vowel Sounds”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 46:2B.458-467.
Sebastián-Gallés, Núria
2005 “
Cross-Language Speech Perception”.
The Handbook of Speech Perception ed. by
David B. Pisoni &
Robert E. Remez, 546-566. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Stevens, Kenneth N. & Arthur S. House
1963 “
Perturbation of Vowel Articulations by Consonantal Context: An acoustical study”.
Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 6:2.111-128.
Stevens, Stanley S., John Volkmann & Edwin B. Newman
1937 “
A Scale for the Measurement of the Psychological Magnitude Pitch”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 8:3.185-190.
Strange, Winifred
1989 “
Dynamic Specification of Coarticulated Vowels Spoken in Sentence Context”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 85:5.2135-2153.
Strange, Winifred, Erika S. Levy & Franzo F. Law
2009 “
Cross-Language Categorization of French and German Vowels by Naïve American Listeners”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126:3.1461-1476.
Strange, Winifred, Andrea Weber, Erika Levy, Valeriy Shafiro, Miwako Hisagi & Kanae Nishi
2007 “
Acoustic Variability within and across German, French, and American English Vowels: Phonetic context effects”.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122:2.1111-1129.
Takagi, Naoyuki & Virginia Mann
1994 “
A Perceptual Basis for the Systematic Phonological Correspondences between Japanese Loan Words and their English Source Words”.
Journal of Phonetics 22:4.343-356.
Vendelin, Inga & Sharon Peperkamp
2006 “
The Influence of Orthography on Loanword Adaptations”.
Lingua 116:7.996-1007.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Wang, Yizhou
2023.
Processing of English Coda Laterals in L2 Listeners: An Eye-Tracking Study.
Language and Speech
Wang, Yizhou, Rikke L. Bundgaard-Nielsen, Brett J. Baker & Olga Maxwell
2023.
Difficulties in decoupling articulatory gestures in L2 phonemic sequences: the case of Mandarin listeners’ perceptual deletion of English post-vocalic laterals.
Phonetica 80:1-2
► pp. 79 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.