Gemination in loanwords is a cross-linguistically widespread phenomenon: a singleton consonant in the source word is geminated in the loanword, even if the doubling does not have an orthographic reflex (that is, the geminated consonant is spelt with a single consonant letter in the source word). Source languages which these words are borrowed from do not allow phonetic geminates. Some examples ...

Anaptyxis-prothesis asymmetries, common in loanword adaptation and interlanguage phonology, are characterized by vowel insertion before sibilant + stop clusters, but into obstruent + sonorant clusters. I propose that such patterns reflect an epenthesis strategy in which the site of epenthesis is chosen to maximize perceptual similarity between input and output. Experimental evidence in support ...

Korean has a three-way laryngeal contrast in oral stops. This paper reports perception patterns of plosives of Japanese, French, English and Chinese by Korean speakers. In Korean loanwords, laryngeal contrasts of Japanese, French, and English plosives show distinct patterns. To test whether perception explains the loanword patterns, we selected languages with different acoustic properties and c...

In Japanese loanword phonology, geminates optionally devoice when there is another voiced obstruent within the same stem, i.e., geminates may optionally devoice when they violate OCP(voice). This devoicing of OCP-violating geminates has received much attention in the recent phonological literature. However, the debates centering around this phenomenon have relied primarily on intuition-based da...

Abstract Research suggests that English-derived loanwords in Japanese can affect learners' acquisition and receptive knowledge of their English words origin (‘basewords'). This study adopts a corpus-based approach to expand on this research by exploring the effects productive knowledge. It primarily uses corpus written produced learners English, native speakers, samples from compare quantitativ...

In this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of Russian loanword adaptation in Persian, on the view of Optimal Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993, 2003). It is the first study of phonological process on Russian loanwords adaptation in Persian. By gathering about 50 current Russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. We found out that vowel insertion, vowel prothesis...

Japanese words are either accented (HL tonal melody: H | a m L | e ‘rain’ ) or unaccented (H tonal melody: a m H | e ‘candy’). Whereas the locus of accent (i.e. mora that bears H tone before a L tone, represented henceforth by acute accent) is lexically determined in native and Sino-Japanese nouns (e.g. híru ‘leech’; hirú ‘noon’), in loanwords it is predictable enough to suggest a grammatical e...