The phonological adaptation of loanwords with unstressed and stressed mid-vowels in Catalan. State of the art and experimental analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe and analyze the phonological adaptations of loanwords in which a stressed and an unstressed mid-vowel co-occur in the variety of the Catalan language spoken in the Barcelona area. To this end, we conducted an utterance test with 20 subjects (10 females and 10 males) aged between 30 and 46. Participants were asked to pronounce – through visual stimuli – 93 oxytone and paroxytone loans, all with a stressed and an unstressed mid-vowel. We further conducted a perception test in which the same subjects were asked to assess – through 390 sound stimuli – the degree of naturalness of the different possible phonetic adaptations for the same 93 loans. The results, obtained from a statistical analysis that combines structural and extralinguistic variables, show that the most common solution is the absence of vowel reduction and the absence of vowel opening (non-nativization), whereas the rest of the patterns, with a full nativization or a partial nativization of the loans, are marginal, and their occurrence depends on factors such as the oxytone or paroxytone character of the loan, the vowel quality discrepancy or coincidence within the loan, and the front or back character of the unstressed and stressed vowels involved. The study also considers social variables, such as sex, and shows that innovative patterns which are not present in the native Catalan lexicon are more frequent in the utterances of women than in those of men.