A PERCEPTUAL BASIS FOR THE SYSTEMATIC PHONOLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN JAPANESE LOAD WORDS AND THEIR ENGLISH SOURCE WORDS

There exist systematic sound correspondences in Japanese loan words wh ose English origins contain a tense or lax vowel followed by a voicele ss stop. For English words of the structure (C-1)V1C2({C-3/v(2)}), the length of Japanese ban word vowels and consonants corresponding to V, (tense or lax) and C, (voiceless stop) is predicted by the quality of V, and any following elements. To test the hypothesis that these corr espondences follow from perceptual assimilation, 18 native speakers of Japanese were presented with nonsense words uttered by two native spe akers of American English, where C-1 = /g/, V-1 = /I, i, u, u/, C-2 = /p, t, k/, C-3 = /s, t/ and v(2) = /(sic)/. The subjects chose which o f four katakana representations sounded closest to each stimulus: S(ho rt)V + S(ingle)C, SV + G(eminate)C, L(ong)V + SC or LV + GC. The respo nse patterns for CVC and CVC/s/ tokens were consistent with the experi mental hypothesis in so far as they matched loan word correspondences and correlated with certain durational properties of the stimuli. Howe ver, the responses to CVC/t/ and CVCv tokens did not match the existin g systematic correspondences, implicating factors other than perceptua l assimilation.