Interpreting phonetic detail in loanword adaptation: the case of schwa

1. Interpreting phonetic detail in loanword adaptation: the case of schwa Lisa Davidson, Department of Linguistics, New York University 1. Introduction 3. Experiment: Transcription Task Materials and Procedure • How do loanwords enter a language? • Whole communities become increasingly bilingual (e.g. Huave & Spanish; Davidson & Noyer 1997) • Adopters know orthography (e.g., Japanese & English, Smith 2005) • And the case under consideration here: • Imperfect bilinguals borrow new words and pass them on(various languages, Paradis & LaCharité, 2001) • Consonant sequence composition • /f/-initial: /f/+/p,t,k,s,n,m/ • /z/-initial: /z/+/b,d,g,v,n.m/ • /v/-initial: /v+/b,d,g,z,n,m/ • Stimuli were created from the output of one English speaker from the Davidson (2006) production study • Stimuli: 3 types (conditions): • Cluster: CC-initial (e.g. [zgamo]) • Lexical Schwa: CəC-initial (e.g. [zəgamo]) • Inserted Schwa: CəC-initial (e.g. [zəgamo]) • Participants: 20 native English speakers • Task: Auditory stimuli spoken by English speaker presented 2x • Ss given 5 sec. to write response • Practice session with feedback • Major response types: correct (for Inserted, participants wrote CVC), schwa deleted, schwa inserted, C1 changed, C1 deleted Perception in loanword adaptation When loanwords are passed from imperfect bilinguals to the larger monolingual community, perception undoubtedly shapes how loanwords are adapted (for a range of opinions, see Peperkamp & Dupoux 2003, Broselow 2004, Kang 2003, Jacobs & Gussenhoven 2000, Paradis & LaCharité, 1997) 4. Results Overall Accuracy Repair Types: CC Repair Types: CəC vs. CəC • “Disseminators”: When non-bilingual borrowers adopt a word with phonotactically illegal characteristics, the articulatory implementation may deviate both from the source language and from the native language. • “Recipients”: Monolingual community members who acquire a word from a disseminator must assign it an underlying representation. 2. Acoustic consequences of articulatory difficulties: Production and perception of non-native clusters • Less evidence of perceptual epenthesis than for other languages (cf. Dupoux et al 1999, Kabak 2003) • More deletion for CəC than for CəC. • Still, 54% of CəC transcribed as CVC • Collapsing over consonant type (n.s.) • Significantly less “accurate” on CəC than on CəC or CC. • Previous production results: English speakers repair non-native #CC by inserting vocalic material (Davidson 2006) • Source:Slovak /zgamo/  English output[zəgamo] (vs. [zəgamo]) • Inserted schwa has significantly shorter duration, lower midpoint F1 and F2 than lexical schwa • Inserted schwa is attributed to decreased articulatory overlap of consonants; a period of open vocal tract leads to transitional vocoid 5. Discussion • Overall, there is variability in whether [CəC] is transcribed as CC or CVC. • Suggests that recipients may variably assign disseminators’ [CəC] productions to /CVC/ or /CC/ underlying representations (cf. Cook Islands Maori, Hall 2003). • Conclusions and Future Directions • Can discrimination between [CəC] and [CəC] or [CC] be improved if the words are paired with meaning? Picture matching task in the works! • Participants transcribe [CəC] as CC significantly more often than they transcribe [CəC] as CC . • Recipients are aware of acoustic differences between inserted and lexical schwas at least some of the time. • Consistent with the hypothesis that recipients recognize that [CəC] may result from the disseminators’ “failed” attempt to articulate a non-native /CC/ • Production implications for perception & loanword adaptation: • If these words were borrowed by disseminators into English, would recipients perceive the acoustic differences between inserted and lexical schwa? • If so, do they reinterpret [ə] as [ə]? Or do they recover the speaker’s intended CC? • Naïve hypothesis: recipients do analyze [ə] as [ə]. In a transcription task, they’ll write [CəC] as CVC. Thanks to Jeris Brunette of NYU for help with this study.