A Psycholinguistic Theory of Loanword Adaptations

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Marginal contrast in loanword phonology:Production and perception

Though Dutch is usually described as lacking a voicing contrast at the velar place of articulation, due to intense language contact and heavy lexical borrowing, a contrast between /k/ and /g/ has recently been emerging. We explored the status of this contrast in Dutch speakers in both production and perception. We asked participants to produce loanwords containing a /g/ in the source language (e.g., goal) and found a range of productions, including a great many unadapted [g] tokens. We also tested the same speakers on their perception of the emerging [k] ~ [g] contrast and found that our participants were able to discriminate the emerging contrast well. We additionally explored the possibility that those speakers who use the new contrast more in production are also better at perceiving it, but we did not observe strong evidence of such a link. Overall, our results indicate that the adoption of the new sound is well advanced in the population we tested, but is still modulated by individual-level factors. We hold that contrasts emerging through borrowing, like other phonological contrasts, are subject to perceptual and functional constraints, and that these and other ‘marginal contrasts’ must be considered as full-fledged parts of phonology

English-learning infants’ perception of word stress patterns

Adult speakers of different free stress languages (e.g., English, Spanish) differ both in their sensitivity to lexical stress and in their processing of suprasegmental and vowel quality cues to stress. In a head-turn preference experiment with a familiarization phase, both 8-month-old and 12-month-old English-learning infants discriminated between initial stress and final stress among lists of Spanish-spoken disyllabic nonwords that were segmentally varied (e.g. [ˈnila, ˈtuli] vs [luˈta, puˈki]). This is evidence that English-learning infants are sensitive to lexical stress patterns, instantiated primarily by suprasegmental cues, during the second half of the first year of life

Looking for the bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants

Abstract Adults and toddlers systematically associate certain pseudowords, such as 'bouba' and 'kiki', with round and spiky shapes, respectively. The ontological origin of this so-called bouba-kiki effect is unknown: it could be an unlearned aspect of perception, appear with language exposure, or only emerge with the ability to produce speech sounds (i.e., babbling). We report the results of three experiments with five-and six-month-olds that found no bouba-kiki effect at all. We discuss the consequences of these findings for the emergence of cross-modal associations in infant speech perception