In second language acquisition, a learner's native phonology has been shown to have considerable influence on the perception of the learned language. Loanword research, on the other hand, has mostly neglected the role of perception in the adaptation of loanwords. Where the issue of perception is discussed, one extreme point of view is that speakers possess a universal phonological vocabulary, another is that only segments are adapted in perception; there is agreement, however, that the phonotactics of a language does not influence the perception of foreign words.
The present study is gathering empirical evidence concerning this issue by testing the adaptations of Russian initial consonant clusters by English speakers in production and perception. All clusters are illicit in English, but contain only segments of the English inventory. The production data have shown a high variability between clusters in terms of the preferred adaptations, with epenthesis as the overall most frequent, followed by segment changes and deletion. 50% of the tokens were changed towards greater acceptability in English. Similar results were obtained from an experiment in which participants were asked to give an orthographic representation of the stimuli, thus approaching the role of perception.
To improve on this by excluding effects of the native phonology occurring after perception, I am carrying out categorical perception experiments consisting of discrimination tasks for pairs of stimuli along acoustic continua. For each cluster, the continua will run from the original cluster to various adapted forms. If perception is influenced by the native phonotactics, English speakers are expected to perform significantly worse than native Russian speakers.