English Sibilants before /i/ in Korean Loanwords

Korean lacks a contrast between anterior and posterior fricatives before the high front vowel /i/, as only posterior fricatives occur in this context. Yet the Korean loanword system distinguishes English /s/ and /?/ using secondary labialization and the fortis-lenis contrast. The fact that English /s/ and /?/ are mapped respectively to [? * ] and [? ? ] in Korean loanwords may be related to the phonetic similarity. Experimental results show that Korean [? * ] and [? ? ] are acoustically and perceptually the closest to English /s/ and /?/, respectively. This seemingly supports perception-based models of loanword adaptation (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux 2003), and argues against phonemic accounts of loanword adaptation (e.g., LaCharite and Paradis 2005), which predict the anterior-posterior contrast of English to be neutralized in the Korean loanword system. However, if loanword adaptation is purely based on phonetic similarity, we expect a labialized affricate to be used in place of English /t?/, just as a labialized friative replaces English /?/. The crucial difference between fricatives and affricates lies in the role of frication noise frequency, which is affected by the secondary labialization, in signaling the phonological contrasts of English. Whereas noise frequency difference is an essential cue for the contrast between /s/ and /?/, it does not play a role in distinguishing the affricate /t?/ from other English consonants. To capture this contrast-specific importance of phonetic similarity in loanword adaptation, I propose that cross-linguistic sound mapping occurs at the level of auditory feature representation containing only the phonetic details relevant to the perception of phonemic contrasts.