Martin, 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.

Scatterplot of the production-perception difference (diffPP), as a

PDF] Quasi-phonemic contrast and the fuzzy inventory: examples

Laboratory Phonology Issue: Issue: 1(13) Volume 13 (2022)

PDF) Marginal contrast in loanword phonology: Production and

Percent Prevoiced /ɡ/ by Language and Group Aggregated by Child

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan) - Bennett - 2022

Frontiers Within-Speaker Perception and Production of Two

Martin Marginal contrast in loanword phonology: Production and

PDF) Marginal contrast in loanword phonology: Production and

On the perceptual origin of loanword adaptations: experimental

Results reported in McGuire (2007) demonstrating a significant

On the perceptual origin of loanword adaptations: experimental