Ko te mōhiotanga huna o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori (The implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers)

This article outlines recent experiments on the implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers living in New Zealand. It expands on the work of Oh et al. (2020) who show that, despite not knowing the language, non-Māori speakers have impressive phonotactic and lexical knowledge, which has presumably been built through ambient exposure to the language. In this paper, we extend this work by investigating morphological and syntactic knowledge. Experiment 1 asks non-Māori speakers to morphologically segment Māori words. It shows that they have an impressive degree of ability to recognize Māori morphs, and also that their false segmentations are in the locations that are phonotactically most likely to be morpheme boundaries. Experiment 2 asks non-Māori speakers to rate the likelihood that Māori sentences are grammatical. They rate grammatical Māori sentences significantly higher than matched sentences containing the same words in the wrong order. Their error patterns reveal significant sensitivity to legal versus non-legal sentence endings. Taken together, the results reveal that ambient exposure to te reo Māori leads to extensive subconscious knowledge regarding te reo Māori, and provide a strong real-world example of implicit language learning

Proto-Lexicon Size and Phonotactic Knowledge are Linked in Non-Māori Speaking New Zealand Adults

Most people in New Zealand are exposed to the Māori language on a regular basis, but do not speak it. It has recently been claimed that this exposure leads them to create a large proto-lexicon, consisting of implicit memories of words and word parts, without semantic knowledge. This yields sophisticated phonotactic knowledge (Oh et al., 2020). This claim was supported by two tasks in which Non-Māori-Speaking New Zealanders: (i) Distinguished real words from phonotactically matched non-words, suggesting lexical knowledge; (ii) Gave wellformedness ratings of non-words almost indistinguishable from those of fluent Māori speakers, demonstrating phonotactic knowledge.Oh et al. (2020) ran these tasks on separate participants. While they hypothesised that phonotactic and lexical knowledge derived from the proto-lexicon, they did not establish a direct link between them. We replicate the two tasks, with improved stimuli, on the same set of participants. We find a statistically significant link between the tasks: Participants with a larger proto-lexicon (evidenced by performance in the Word Identification Task) show greater sensitivity to phonotactics in the Wellformedness Rating Task. This extends the previously reported results, increasing the evidence that exposure to a language you do not speak can lead to large-scale implicit knowledge about that language

Awakening the Proto‐Lexicon: A Proto‐Lexicon Gives Learning Advantages for Intentionally Learning a Language

Abstract: Previous studies report that exposure to the Māori language on a regular basis allows New Zealand adults who cannot speak Māori to build a proto‐lexicon of Māori—an implicit memory of word forms without detailed knowledge of meaning. How might this knowledge feed into explicit language learning? Is it possible to “awaken” the proto‐lexicon in the context of overt language learning? We investigate whether implicit linguistic knowledge represented in a proto‐lexicon gives any advantages for intentional language learning in a tertiary educational environment. We conducted a three‐task experiment which: (a) assessed participants’ Māori proto‐lexicon, (b) assessed their phonotactic knowledge, and (c) tested them on Māori vocabulary that they had been exposed to during the course at two time points. The results show that students with larger Māori proto‐lexicons learn more words in a classroom setting. This study shows that proto‐lexicon acquired from ambient exposure can lead to significant benefits in language learning

Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan

Abstract: Recent findings show adult New Zealanders who do not speak te reo Māori (the Māori language, the indigenous language of New Zealand) nonetheless have impressive implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of the language. These findings have been interpreted as showing that regular ambient exposure to a non-native language develops an implicit “proto-lexicon”, a memory store of lexical forms in that language, without any meaning. However, what is not known is the timeframe over which this knowledge is acquired. Does the knowledge stem exclusively from implicit learning during childhood, or does it continue to grow based on exposure during adulthood? To investigate this question, we directly compare non-Māori-speaking school-aged adolescents and adults in New Zealand and explore how age affects the degree of observed knowledge. Our results show that ambient exposure leads to implicit knowledge both in childhood and adulthood, and that continuing exposure throughout the lifespan leads to increased knowledge

Ko te mōhiotanga huna o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori

This article outlines recent experiments on the implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers living in New Zealand. It expands on the work of Oh et al. (2020) who show that, despite not knowing the language, non-Māori speakers have impressive phonotactic and lexical knowledge, which has presumably been built through ambient exposure to the language. In this paper, we extend this work by investigating morphological and syntactic knowledge. Experiment 1 asks non-Māori speakers to morphologically segment Māori words. It shows that they have an impressive degree of ability to recognize Māori morphs, and also that their false segmentations are in the locations that are phonotactically most likely to be morpheme boundaries. Experiment 2 asks non-Māori speakers to rate the likelihood that Māori sentences are grammatical. They rate grammatical Māori sentences significantly higher than matched sentences containing the same words in the wrong order. Their error patterns reveal significant sensitivity to legal versus non-legal sentence endings. Taken together, the results reveal that ambient exposure to te reo Māori leads to extensive subconscious knowledge regarding te reo Māori, and provide a strong real-world example of implicit language learning