Language experience, speech perception and loanword adaptation: Variable adaptation of English word-final plosives into Korean

•Korean listeners׳ English experience influences how they adapt English novel words.•Korean near-monolingual listeners show strong effects of sub-phonemic details.•Early bilinguals' borrowing is not influenced by non-contrastive phonetic details.•Variable adaptation can stem from borrowers' perception of source language sounds.

This study examines the influence of experience with the source language for loanwords on loanword adaptation, asking whether the influence can be attributed to listener-borrowers' perception of the source language. The study focuses on variable insertion of /ɨ/ after word-final plosives in novel English words borrowed into Korean. Korean participants who differ in the extent of their English experience are asked to borrow English non-word stimuli ending on a coda plosive into Korean by attaching appropriate Korean case-markers to the stimuli. Korean case-marker allomorphy determines whether the participants insert /ɨ/ after the coda plosives or not. Four context factors, namely, coda release, coda voicing, coda place of articulation, and pre-coda vowel tenseness, are investigated. The results indicate that Korean listeners' experience with English influences how they perform the task of borrowing, or adding a case-marker suffix to, English non-words. The effects of the four context factors on the variable vowel insertion are influenced by the listeners' English experience: Listeners' responses in the borrowing task reflect that less experienced listeners are more attentive to non-contrastive phonetic information, such as coda release, than more experienced listeners. The different perception of English sounds altered by the listeners' English experience is proposed to be responsible for the seemingly random variation in loanword adaptation patterns.