The influence of orthography on loanword adaptations Inga Vendelin a,b, * , Sharon Peperkamp a,b a Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, 46, rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France b De ´partement des Sciences du Langage, Universite ´ Paris VIII, 2, rue de la Liberte ´, 93526 Saint-Denis, France Received 4 February 2005; received in revised form 9 July 2005; accepted 10 July 2005 Available online 13 October 2005 Abstract We investigate the influence of orthography on loanword adaptations by means of an experiment in which late French–English bilinguals produce on-line adaptations of English non-words. In half of the experiment, the stimuli are presented orally only, whereas in the other half, the oral stimuli are accompanied by their written representation. The adaptations of eight English vowels are shown to be different according to whether the input is oral or mixed (i.e. oral + written). In particular, the adaptations based on the mixed input more often reflect the way French speakers are used to read English graphemes. These results thus confirm the sensitivity of loanword adaptations to the presence versus absence of a written representation. We conclude that in order to control for orthography, loanword adaptations are best studied in an experimental framework. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Loanword adaptations; Orthography; Phonology; Phonetics 1. Introduction Most research on loanword adaptations is directed towards formulating phonological and/or phonetic principles that determine how loanwords are nativized. Loanword adaptations are thus considered a purely grammatical phenomenon, on a par with native alternations. However, many other factors are likely to influence if and how loanwords are adapted. For instance, speech communities differ with respect to the presence of bilingual speakers and their level of proficiency, as well as to the presence of native speakers of the source language. Likewise, the prestige of the source language may vary across different speech communities. These differences can all be sources of variation for the speed at which loanwords are nativized and the nature of the adaptations they undergo at various stages. www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Lingua 116 (2006) 996–1007 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 1 44 32 23 52; fax: +33 1 44 32 23 60. E-mail addresses: Inga.Vendelin@ens.fr (I. Vendelin), Sharon.Peperkamp@ens.fr (S. Peperkamp). 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2005.07.005