15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Reinterpreting Loanword Adaptations: The Role of Perception

Sharon Peperkamp, Emmanuel Dupoux

LSCP/EHESS/ENS/CNRS, France

Standard phonological accounts of loanword adaptations state that the inputs to the adaptations are constituted by the surface forms of the words in the source language and that the adaptations are computed by the phonological grammar of the borrowing language. In processing terms, this means that in perception, the phonetic form of the source words is faithfully copied onto an abstract underlying form, and that adaptations are produced by the standard phonological processes in production. We argue that this is at odds with speech perception models and propose that loanword adaptations take place in perception and are defined as phonetically minimal transformations.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Peperkamp, Sharon / Dupoux, Emmanuel (2003): "Reinterpreting loanword adaptations: the role of perception", In ICPhS-15, 367-370.