The Orthography Effect in Loanword Adaptation: Variable Adaptation of English VNV Sequences into Mandarin Chinese

There is variation in the adaptation of loanwords, because the adaptation may be based on the similarity in pronunciation or spelling. For example, the English word Manitoba (containing a VNV sequence) is borrowed into Mandarin Chinese (MC) as man.ni.tuo.ba (a perception-based adaptation) or ma.ni.tuo.ba (an orthography-based adaptation). Previous studies indicate that the orthography seems to play a greater role in influencing loanword adaptation patterns in some cases than others. But few studies attempt to explain the factors that influence the degree of orthography effect in the lexical borrowing process. To fill in the gap, the present study aims to explore three extra-linguistic factors that may determine the degrees of orthography effect. The three factors are borrowers' L2 proficiency, times of exposure to L2 letter-sound pairs, and the spelling similarity between the source word and the loan word (source-loan spelling similarity). In order to examine the effect of these factors, an online adaptation experiment was conducted. The experiment involves borrowing the English non-words containing VNV sequences into MC. The results demonstrate that the degree of orthographic influence is closely associated with these factors. The findings can be well addressed within the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading. In the lexical borrowing, the L1 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules (GPCs) will be more frequently activated when reading L2 words if (i) borrowers are less proficient L2 learners or monolingual speakers of L1, (ii) borrowers are less frequently exposed to certain L2 letter-sound pairs, and (iii) the spellings of words from source language (SL) are highly similar to those in the borrowing language (BL), thereby leading to more orthography-based adaptations. The study concludes by proposing that the loanword adaptation result may be systematically influenced by the orthography, and deviate from the prediction of perceptual and phonological similarity. Orthography influences in loanword adaptation would be maximal if borrowers are uncertain or unknown about the phonemic identity of the input source word.