Cho, Mi-Hui and Soonyong Jeong. 2016. English vowel adaptation in Korean: Cases of loanwords with English /ɛ/ and /æ/. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 22.2. 361-381.
The present study aims to investigate factors influencing loanword adaption of English /ɛ/ and /æ/ in Korean by comparing loanword mapping with perceptual mapping quantitatively. Results show that there are moderate correlations between the loanword and perceptual mapping probabilities, but the perceptual factor alone cannot account for the overall loanword mapping pattern of English /ɛ/ and /æ/. The deviation of loanword mapping from perceptual mapping is accounted for by standardization and orthography. Specifically, standardization that stipulates Korean /ɛ/-mapping for English /ɛ/ and Korean /æ/-mapping for English /æ/ results in the suppression of perceptual variability between Korean /ɛ/-mapping and /æ/-mapping across lexical items. The unexpected loanword mapping of Korean /a/ for English /æ/ is accounted for by an orthography effect. In addition, a merging effect between /ɛ/ and /æ/ in Korean on English /ɛ/ and /æ/ adaptation was not attested across lexical items, but the predominant occurrence of the Korean variant /ɛ/ over the Korean variant /æ/ in within-lexical-item variation seems to reflect the direction of the merger in Korean in which /æ/ is merged into /ɛ/. (Kyonggi University)