Phonetic and Other Factors in Japanese On-line Adaptation of English Final Consonants

The phonological adaptation of words borrowed from English into Japanese has been investigated extensively in recent years, from the competing perspectives of both 'category preservation' and 'perceptual assimilation'. This paper adduces experimental support for the idea that approaches to loanword phonology need to be tempered by the awareness that adapters have of the source language's orthographic conventions and prescribed correspondences to the recipient language's sound system. In particular, phonetic approximation indicates that English final stops following lax vowels should be adapted as geminates in Japanese, but, experimentally, this effect is inhibited when listeners are made aware of the source language spellings.