1. Introduction Phonologists have long held an interest in loanword adaptations, that is in transformations of foreign words into forms that better conform to the phonotactics of the borrowing language. Analyses of such adaptations generally involve phonological processes that apply to the phonetic representation of the words in the source language. In this paper, we look at loanword adaptation...

A hierarchical framework is proposed to address the issues of modeling different type of words in keyword spotting (KWS). Keyword models are built at various levels according to the availability of training set resources for each individual word. The proposed approach improves the performance of KWS even when no training speech is available for the keywords. It also suggests an easier way to co...

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The present article examines the changes that affect stressed vowels in the nativization of loanwords into Standard German, e.g. laxing of vowels like [i] to [i] in Ffijrma (< Italian Ffijrma). An Optimality-Theoretic treatment (Prince & Smolensky 1993) of the loanword data is proposed in which the nativization process is accounted for by ranking two MARKEDNESS constraints ahead of two FAITH co...

When an English word with a postvocalic word-final stop is adapted to Korean, a vowel is variably inserted after the final stop. Vowel insertion in this position is puzzling not only because of its variability but also because of the fact that it is not motivated by the native phonology in any obvious way. After providing a thorough description of the vowel-insertion pattern on the basis of a s...

There is great variation in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted or retained. Importantly, the retention of foreign sounds can lead to a sound change in the language. We propose that social factors influence the likelihood of loanword sound adaptation, and use this case to introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying language change that captures the role of social factors. S...