Eliciting the Dutch loan phoneme /g/ with the menu task

This article introduces the menu task, which can be used to elicit infrequent sounds such as loan phonemes that only occur in a restricted set of words. The menu task is similar to the well-known map task and involves the interaction of two participants to create a menu on the basis of a list of words (all referring to food). This new task was used to obtain realizations of loanwords with a voiced velar plosive /g/ by an older and a younger group of native speakers of Dutch, which lacks this phoneme. Results show that all participants were fairly consistent in their pronunciations per word. However, the younger group had word-specific realizations: they employed a voiceless uvular fricative [χ] in spaghetti and a voiced velar stop [g] in gorgonzola, while the older group used a voiced or voiceless plosive in both words. These findings indicate a lexically diffusing sound change in the adaptation of /g/ into Dutch.