Japanese is crucially different from other ‘accent languages’ in having a number of ‘unaccented words’, or words that are pronounced with a rather flat F0 contour. This paper illuminates some phonological factors responsible for the emergence of this peculiar type of word accent in Tokyo Japanese. It demonstrates, specifically, that unaccentedness emerges in words of some specific syllable stru...

In order to investigate to what extent perceptual factors affect the borrowing process, we examined the borrowing of English obstruents in Korean by comparing loanword adaptation patterns with the natives’ P-map (Steriade, 2001b). The orthographic classification technique was used to obtain the P-map (e.g., Wiik, 1965; Schmidt, 1996); 40 native Koreans were asked to choose the best matching Kor...