This study examines how phonetic details produced by non-bilingual borrowers (‘disseminators ’) are categorised when new words are transmitted to the monolinguals of the borrowing language community (‘recipients’). The stimuli are based on research showing that the schwa inserted by English speakers into non-native clusters (e.g. /zgAmo/£[z@gAmo]) differs acoustically from lexical schwa (e.g. [...

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...

Building on previous works (e.g. Kubozono 2006, and Kang 2010), this article attempts to establish a taxonomy for loanword prosody, referring specifically to the patterns of stress, tone, or pitch-accent that are found in loanwords. Toward a taxonomy, we consider the following factors: (i) whether the pronunciation of the word in the source language influences the assignment of prosody in the b...

This quantitative study examines vowel adaptation patterns in English-based Standard Mandarin (SM) loanwords drawn from a dictionary corpus. The findings are: (i) English non-central vowels are mostly matched in backness in SM, (ii) English high and low vowels have a strong tendency to be retained as high and low respectively in SM, whereas matches for English mid vowels mostly vary between mid...