Evidence for phonetic adaptation of loanwords: an experimental study

Japanese loanword adaptations show an asymmetry in the treatment of word-final [n] in words from French and English, respectively: while word-final [n] is adapted as a moraic nasal consonant in loanwords from English, it is adapted as a geminate nasal followed by an epenthetic vowel in loanwords from French. We provide evidence that this asymmetry originates in the way Japanese speakers perceive word-final [n] in French and English. Indeed, in a forced choice task with nonwords, Japanese listeners perceived an epenthetic vowel significantly more often in stimuli produced by French speakers than in stimuli produced by American English speakers. In the former, the final nasal consonant was longer and had a more important vocalic release than in the latter; the perception of an epenthetic vowel correlated with the length and intensity of the nasal consonant and its release, showing that listeners are sensitive to fine phonetic detail. We conclude, then, that the adaptation of word-final [n] in loanwords reflects phonetically minimal transformations that apply during speech perception.