Factors in on-line loanword adaptation

This thesis investigates the factors influencing the adaptation of foreign words to English, beyond traditional phonological parameters such as sonority distance. The data examined were produced in an on-line adaptation task to study purely linguistic rather than orthographic or historical influences. The adapted words contain only lesser-studied phonotactic problems rather than segmental ill-formedness. The choice of Russian as a donor and English as a borrowing language allow the study of adaptations in a setting which allows a further strategy of alteration of ill-formed consonant clusters beyond vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion, namely the substitution of segments to change one cluster into another. In contrast to previous research, English production of Russian stimuli with initial consonant clusters showed that segment change is applied frequently, comparable to the amount of vowel epenthesis. Extensive variation was observed, both in ratio of successful production, and in the choice and distribution of adaptation strategy. The factors in adaptation investigated were the sonority distance of the foreign clusters, as well as concepts which have received much recent attention within phonology, namely gradient grammaticality, similarity and frequency: English native speaker judgments were collected about the perceived grammaticality of foreign clusters and the similarity between targets and adaptations, while the frequency of possible adaptations in English was calculated from a corpus of spoken English. Results show that sonority cannot explain the variation in adaptation. Furthermore, frequency has no influence on the choice of adaptation; however, higher perceived badness results in a higher percentage of adaptations, and perceived similarity is decisive for the choice of adaptations. A comparison of similarity judgments of English and Russian listeners suggested that, in keeping with Steriade (2001), there are some cross-linguistically corresponding rankings of similarity; however, differences between languages due to phonotactics and phonetic detail were also found. In summary, the experiment results suggest that the adaptation of loanwords occurs in both in perception and production; furthermore, it is determined both by L1 specifics and cross-linguistic tendencies, an thus neither a straightforward application of L1 phonology nor completely independent of language background

Grammatical and Non-Grammatical Factors in Loanword Adaptation

ABSTRACT This study widens the approach of loanword research to include not only phonological differences between borrowing and donor language, but also factors which may not depend solely on these differences, e.g. similarity, frequency and gradient grammaticality. The influence of these factors on the performance of English speakers in a shadowing task of Russian words with English-illegal initial clusters was tested. The frequency of potential adapted onsets in the English lexicon does not correlate with the strategy of adaptation. Judgments about the grammaticality of words containing illegal initial clusters and the similarity between pairs of words partially containing illegal onsets were obtained from English native speakers. Similarity of a target to an adaptation was shown to be a predictor of its rate of use. The perceived grammaticality of a target cluster influenced performance in two ways: high-grammaticality target clusters were modified less often, and low-grammaticality clusters were mostly associated with vowel epenthesis. BACKGROUND Loanword research has mainly been concerned with the comparison of phonological representations, e.g. English /straik/ vs. Japanese /sutoraiki/, and of differences between grammars. It has tried to determine the mechanisms that transform the representation of the input to the representation of the output. What has been neglected is the question whether these adaptations are purely grammar-driven, or whether other factors such as perception also play a role. Second language research has shown that the perception of foreign phonemes is influenced considerably by the learners' native phonology and thus a major source of mistakes and difficulties with the phonological system of the learned language. Learners tend to project new phones onto phonemes of their first language, e.g. French learners often perceive English [T] as /s/ (see The present study deals with phonotactic differences, specifically with English speakers adapting (in a production experiment) Russian words that contain English-legal segments, but are illegal in English because of their initial cluster combinations. There are very few loanwords from Russian in English; this hypothetical rather than a real loanword situation was chosen to exclude confounding historical factors such as orthography and established strategies as in Japanese. Additional motivation to choose Russian as a source language comes from its wealth in consonant clusters, the majority of which are illegal in English, e.g. initial /dv, fp, vl, zb/. The aim of this paper is to study the influence not only of perception, but also of three further factors on performance and choice of strategy when confronted with phonotactically illegal foreign words: (1) degree of grammaticality, predicted by the hierarchy of violated constraints within Optimality Theory (e.g. sonority distance and Obligatory Contour Principle); (2) phonetic similarity, predicted by consonant similarity values calculated from structured specification ([5]); (3) frequency, measured in the CELEX database. PRODUCTION TASKS Initially, it was necessary to determine the kinds of adaptation that occur when English speakers attempt to produce a Russian-sounding word, as there are no Russian to English loanwords. To this effect, production experiments with Russian pseudo-words containing initial clusters that are illegal in English were performed. The first experiment was a shadowing task, in which participants were instructed to repeat words they heard. The results of this, however, can reflect the influence of a number of factors including articulation, phonotactic wellformedness and perception. Therefore an orthographic task, in which the participants had to give orthographic 15th ICPhS Barcelona 1185 ISBN 1-876346-48-

Total pancreatic lipomatosis with malabsorption syndrome

Total fat replacement of the pancreas is rare. Focal fatty replacement is the most common degenerative lesion of pancreas. Focal fatty deposits have no major clinical significance; however, extreme fat replacement is of pathologic significance, as it is associated with marked reduction in exocrine function of pancreas, resulting in malabsorption due to pancreatic enzyme insufficiency