Correspondences between loanwords, L2 perception and L2 production

Abstract

The influence of perception on loanwords and second language (L2) production has been long debated. Some researchers believe that the perceptual categorization of foreign sounds successfully predict the patterns found in loanwords and L2 production

in this view, L2 perception is viewed as the driving force behind loanword adaptation and L2 speech production. Others have posited that the influence of perception on loanwords and L2 speech is not as straightforward

in this view, it is suggested that other factors (e.g., phonological abstraction of the input form, orthography, production difficulties, social conventions, etc.) are also important in the derivation process. In this vein, the current study aims to elucidate the role of non-native perception on loanword adaptation and L2 production through a quantificational comparison their maps. In particular, Koreans interaction with the English interdental fricatives is observed in varying vowel contexts and prosodic positions. A perception experiment and a production experiment are conducted on 47 native Korean speakers. The results collected from the two experiments are compared to a Korean loanword corpus obtained from a previous study. Correspondence rates are calculated between the probabilities of the three processes in an attempt to observe the degree to which L2 perception predicts loanword adaptation and L2 production. This study finds low correspondences between the three processes in investigation, which indicates that the relationship between loanwords, L2 perception and L2 speech is indirect.