Marginal contrast in loanword phonology : production and perception

A. Martin, Marieke van Heugten, R. Kager, S. Peperkamp

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1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number6454
Number of pages36
JournalLaboratory Phonology
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Open Access - Access Right Statement

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. � 2022 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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