Vowel Adaptation of English Loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract: This study investigates how vowels are adapted from English to Mandarin for sound-based loanwords during adaptation adopting an online adaptation experiment. Compared with the traditional corpus studies, the experiment focuses on the phonological and perceptual factors and eliminates impacts from external factors such as semantics and orthography. The results represent that there is a preference for faithfulness of vowel backness and roundedness over vowel height and phonetic details are taken into consideration during adaptation. Regarding theories of loanword adaptation, there are three major approaches, namely the phonological approach, the phonetic approach and the phonetics-phonology approach. Based on the adaptation patterns, the phonetics-phonology approach better accounts for the data and evidence shows that perceptual similarity plays an important role in the process of loanword adaptation. An OT analysis is proposed to model the generalised patterns of English-to- Mandarin vowel adaptation. This study discovers the vowel adaptation pattern for English-to- Mandarin loanwords and contributes to the mechanisms behind loanword adaptation, enriching our understanding of the function of perceptual similarity in loanword phonology.