Native and Non-Native Patterns in Conflict: Lexicon vs. Grammar in Loanword Adaptation in Brazilian Portuguese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English loanwords with /ʌ/ that are part of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) lexicon are normally produced with [ɐ] (pub: [ˈpɐbɪ]). Although [ɐ] is the closest segment to /ʌ/ in the native inventory, it is highly constrained in BP: it is an allophone of /a/ that can only appear in nasal contexts. This paper investigates whether native speakers of BP generalize to novel loanwords the adaptation pattern of English /ʌ/ that is present in the BP lexicon. Two experiments were conducted, one with real loanwords and one with nonce loanwords. In the Real Loanword Experiment, participants consistently used [ɐ] both in oral (pub) and nasal contexts (funk), as predicted given the patterns in the lexicon. In the Nonce Loanword Experiment, participants used [ɐ] significantly more frequently in nasal contexts – in oral contexts, the most frequent adaptation was [a]. This reveals that speakers employ their native grammar to filter new loanwords: in contexts where [ɐ] is not licensed, they favor the corresponding licensed form. These results suggest that native speakers do not generalize non-native patterns that are present in the lexicon, mirroring what has been observed for the generalization of unnatural patterns in native grammars (e.g., Garcia 2017; Jarosz 2017).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".