Do Native-language Loanwords Affect Second-language Speech Perception?

Japanese has many loanwords from English that have different syllable structure from the source words, e.g., /sutoresu/ from English stress. To investigate whether the abundance of such familiar loanwords interferes with accurate perception of the English source words, native Japanese listeners were asked to count syllables in spoken English words that varied in the degree to which familiar loanword counterparts existed in Japanese. Results indicated that perceptual accuracy was not affected by how familiar listeners were with the loanwords in Japanese, nor by how familiar they were with the English source words. This suggests that loanwords, which are related to the English source words yet phonologically divergent from them, do not necessarily interfere with the perceptual processing of the source words in English.