The role of perceptual salience in bilingual speakers’ integration of illicit long segments in loanwords

•Segment length in Arabic and Swedish loanwords in Turkish is investigated.•Data come from an etymological corpus and from an elicitation task.•In bilingual borrowers, adoption is considered as an alternative to adaptation.•Only Swedish consonant length is not adopted due to low perceptual salience.•Perceptual effects are observed even when the borrowers are nativelike bilinguals.

This paper investigates how bilingual borrowers integrate originally long vowels and consonants in loanwords from Arabic and Swedish into Turkish in illicit positions. Both historical corpus data and data from an elicitation task are used. The main focus is on the role of perceptual salience and the choice between adaptation and adoption as different integration strategies. The results show that length is accurately perceived in both cases of borrowing due to the particular linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts of second language acquisition. Phonologically long Arabic vowels and consonants as well as not phonologically but phonetically long Swedish vowels with high salience are adopted as innovations by the bilingual borrowers. The latter adoption confirms that the input to loanword integration is not phonological but phonetic in nature, i.e. the surface form. Phonologically long Swedish consonants with low salience due to short duration are, instead, adapted through shortening. This adaptation is done in production through a process called filtering in with the help of feedback from perception. The paper proposes that perceptual salience plays an important role not only in monolingual but also in bilingual borrowing by concluding that high perceptual salience is necessary but not sufficient for adoption in bilingual borrowing.