The influence of orthography on loanword adaptations

We investigate the influence of orthography on loanword adaptations by means of an experiment in which late French–English bilinguals produce on-line adaptations of English non-words. In half of the experiment, the stimuli are presented orally only, whereas in the other half, the oral stimuli are accompanied by their written representation. The adaptations of eight English vowels are shown to be different according to whether the input is oral or mixed (i.e. oral + written). In particular, the adaptations based on the mixed input more often reflect the way French speakers are used to read English graphemes. These results thus confirm the sensitivity of loanword adaptations to the presence versus absence of a written representation. We conclude that in order to control for orthography, loanword adaptations are best studied in an experimental framework.