"We can distinguish three approaches in the literature as to how borrowed foreign words are adapted to comply with the host language sound system: the purely perceptual approach, which claims that the adaptation occurs during perception beyond the listeners' conscious awareness, the purely phonological approach, which claims that the underlying representations of the source words are the input to the adaptation and mapped in the host language lexicon to the structurally closest native representations, and the hybrid approach, which claims that the adaptation occurs in the host language production grammar and that the host language production grammar makes direct reference to the phonetic information in the source words. This dissertation evaluates English loanwords in Standard Chinese (SC) against these three approaches, and the results generally support the hybrid approach. While the hybrid approach is supported, it falls short of explaining some of the loanword data. Two problems are pointed out and the solutions are proposed."--Page ii. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).
Read
