Production vs. Perception in Loanword Adaptation: A Reassessment of English Word-final Stops in Korean

초록

This study focuses on unnecessary adaptation, where a source language structure is repaired even when the foreign form would have been faithful to the structure of a borrowing language. One example of this sort of accommodation is found in Korean loanword adaptation; Korean speakers tend to adapt English words ending in stops with vowel insertion even though Korean phonotactics allows word-final stops. This study considers two possible hypotheses to explain this vowel insertion, i.e., adaptation-in-production vs. adaptation-in-perception, and reports on a perception experiment designed to decide between the two approaches. In a categorization task, Korean participants categorized English stop-final and vowel-final nonce forms in a forced choice task where they were asked whether the form ended in a consonant. The experimental result showed that the Korean participants were more likely to identify a final English stop as stop-vowel when the stop was released than when it was unreleased. This finding was consistent with the adaptation-in-perception approach, indicating that the apparently unmotivated vowel insertion in Korean listeners results from their misperception of the English words rather than a production grammar maintaining perceptual similarity between English and Korean forms, and that the illusory vowel perception is correlated with the audible release bursts of the English final stops.

키워드