Patterns in orthographic representation of loanwords have often been used to infer information about phonological categories of the source and recipient languages. However perception studies have shown that loanword data can obscure patterns in perceptual mapping, e.g. Schmidt (1996). Korean exhibits a relatively unique phonemic contrast based on laryngeal activity, commonly referred to as tense /s*/ and lax /s/ or fortis and non-fortis /s/. This study investigates cross-lingustic perceptual mapping for Japanese single and geminate /s/ to the Korean lax /s/ and tense /s*/, and compares the results to predictions made by Japanese-to-Korean loanword research (Ito et al. (2006). A perception study was conducted using 32 bi-syllabic test tokens containing either Japanese single /s/ or geminate /ss/, and 32 bi-syllabic filler tokens, spoken in a carrier phrase by a 20-year-old native speaker of Tokyo Japanese.

All tokens were presented twice in random order so that consistency of judgments could be analyzed. Twenty-two Korean native speakers participated in the experiment. Participants listened to stimuli over headphones and selected one of two orthographic representations for each stimuli, which for test stimuli differed only in whether they contained the character representing lax /s/ or tense /s*/. A linear mixed-effects model was used to evaluate thirteen acoustic and six phonological factors as predictors of response choice. The results contradicted some of the patterns observed by Ito et al. (2006), and in general found that Japanese phonological categories were less effective predictors than acoustic measurements. Additionally, many stimuli were found to have fairly high percentages of inconsistent responses. The results are taken to support a view that Korean native speaker mapping of Japanese fricatives is based on gradient perceptual similarity to native categories.

An alternative description of the processes involved in cross-linguistic adaptation is proposed that references associative learning of acoustic correlates of speech perception and gradient activation of sound representations.