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

The perception and production of epenthetic vowels in non-native clusters in Japanese : phonetic and phonological influences.

This thesis investigates the quality of epenthetic vowel that native speakers of Japanese tend to produce and perceive between unfamiliar sequences of consonants. Research on perceptual epenthesis in Japanese has revealed the high back [ɯ] to be the vowel commonly perceived in illicit consonant sequences. However, loanword studies suggest that there are three epenthetic vowels, which reflect phonotactic restrictions on certain consonant + vowel sequences. That is, the quality of epenthetic vowel is predictable from the preceding consonantal environment. In this study, I tested to what extent the response patterns in perceptual and production experiments are consistent with native phonotactics, and how phonetic properties of the listeners’ native language play a role in speech perception. This thesis first investigates the potential influence of the preceding consonant environment on perception and production of illicit consonant clusters. Second, the current study considers the effect of all vowel categories in Japanese, including allophonic variation of the Japanese high vowel [ɯ] — the high vowel undergoes devoicing when it occurs between voiceless obstruents — on the perception of illicit consonant sequences. This study thus integrates perceptual and production experimental work in an investigation of the contextual environments that contribute to predicting the quality of epenthetic vowels in Japanese. In the perception experiment, a same-different AX discrimination task was employed, in order to determine whether native speakers of Japanese are able to tell the difference between licit [VC1VC2V] (C=consonant, V=vowel) and illicit [VCCV] pairs (e.g., [apata]-[apta]) when they listen to pre-recorded pseudo-word stimuli. In each trial, participants were asked to judge whether a pair of stimuli were the same or different. The experiment enabled us to test whether Japanese listeners perceive an illusory vowel between consonants in an illicit sequence and whether the vowel percept differs according to a given phonological environment. The results show that to some extent, the preceding consonant does influence the vowel perceived, yet there is a bias toward perceiving [ɯ] in voiceless consonantal contexts, a result not predicted by the language’s phonotactic patterns. Additionally, it was found that the order that the stimuli were presented to subjects influences epenthesis in perception. Japanese listeners were less accurate in identifying whether members of a pair were same-different with the [aCVCa-aCCa] order than with the [aCCa-aCVCa] order. In the production experiment, a read-aloud task was employed. Speech production data was collected using the same pseudo-words as in the perception experiment though in this experiment the stimuli were presented to subjects orthographically. The results showed that for some preceding environments, the findings are relatively consistent with expectations based on the language's phonotactics, but this was not the case for all contexts. The results also revealed that there was variability across speakers as to which vowels they epenthesized after particular consonants. The current series of studies revealed that the quality of epenthetic vowels was not merely influenced by the phonotactics of the native language in speech perception and production. Instead, other factors interact in a complex way during speech perception and production

Second-language acquisition of a sublexicon phonology: loanword phonology and phonotactics in Japanese

Language users and learners are sensitive to distributional information in their environment, which enables them to extract regularities that occur in the language input that they are exposed to. This process is referred to as statistical learning. While the statistical learning phonotactic literature thoroughly investigates the learning of overall phonotactics in specific languages, little is known about cases where different phonological systems coexist within a single language. The Japanese lexicon is generally classified into four lexical strata according to the etymological status of each word (Itô & Mester, 1995, 1999, 2001). Although each stratum includes the internal phonological similarity in the Japanese language as a whole, there are also distinctive phonological properties. A recent study suggests that language users should be able to learn phonotactics of each sublexicon based on the same kind of statistical probabilities that computers analyse from language users’ accumulated lexicons (Morita, 2018). This thesis examines whether second-language (L2) learners can learn the loanword phonotactics/phonology of Japanese through experience of using and/or passive exposure to Japanese lexical stratification. Using two loanword phonological regularities (categorical and gradient rules) as a case study, two fully-crossed perceptual experiments involving English- speaking learners of Japanese, native speakers of Japanese, and English-speaking monolinguals are presented. The first experiment explores listeners’ phonotactic/phonological knowledge of nativised loanwords in Japanese using a well-formedness task which shows the adaptation of English final consonants in monosyllabic words. Listeners judge whether the pronunciation they hear is how the word would be pronounced if it was a Japanese word, rating how confident they are on a scale of 1-5. This study shows that L2 learners learn categorical rules, but not gradient patterns. This study also confirms that loanword phonotactics and overall phonotactics make separate contributions to perceived well-formedness. L2 learners access and make use of the sublexicon-specific probabilities of Japanese during the task. The second perceptual experiment is designed to support the findings in the first experiment, by testing for discrimination of non-native consonantal contrasts. Even under high memory demand, L2 learners show the ability to discriminate non-native consonantal contrasts (i.e., CVCV/CVCCV) effectively enough to support findings in the first experiment. These results suggest that L2 learners can implicitly detect the statistical structure of a language’s sublexicon phonology over the course of acquiring a natural language. However, while native speakers of Japanese learn a gradient rule, L2 learners of Japanese do not. A potential explanation for the differences in gradient rule learning is that the vocabulary size of the target language might play a crucial role. This remains an open question. In addition, the present work provides a basis for future investigation into whether L2 learners of Japanese, whose native language is other than English, are able to learn Japanese loanword phonotactics/phonology. L1 English-L2 Japanese speakers might gain advantage in perceiving the English input which inevitably overlaps with the phonological form of the host language

Epenthetic vowel production of unfamiliar medial consonant clusters by Japanese speakers

Existing nativized loanword studies have traditionally suggested that there are three epenthetic vowels in Japanese, which reflect both phonotactic restrictions and articulatory properties of certain consonant-vowel sequences in the language. Recent findings, however, call this tri-partite epenthesis pattern into question: First, several studies suggest that this epenthesis pattern is not true in the realm of perception and is not completely regular in production, and second, the relevant phonotactic restrictions seem to be weakening even outside of epenthesis contexts. This paper therefore investigates the extent to which the spontaneous choice of epenthetic vowels in the 'production' of Japanese conforms to the traditional tri-partite pattern. Epenthesis was induced by presenting pseudo-word stimuli of the form of [aCCa] (C = a voiced consonant) to subjects orthographically. The findings suggest that indeed, the production pattern does not fully conform to what is generally reported for nativized loanwords; in particular, the traditionally “default” vowel [ɯ] is used by our participants frequently in all contexts, including the two where [o] or [i] is usually reported. That said, we also show that there is considerable variability across speakers as to which vowel is epenthesized, especially in the palatal context, and this variability includes tokens of vowels similar to all possible lexical vowels of Japanese

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

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

Morphological segmentations of Non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders match proficient speakers

Abstract: Previous research has shown that non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders have extensive latent knowledge of Māori, despite not being able to speak it. This knowledge plausibly derives from a memory store of Māori forms (Oh et al., 2020; Panther et al., 2023). Modelling suggests that this ‘proto-lexicon’ includes not only Māori words, but also word-parts; however, this suggestion has not yet been tested experimentally. We present the results of a new experiment in which non-Māori speaking New Zealanders and non-New Zealanders were asked to segment a range of Māori words into parts. We show that the degree to which segmentations of non-Māori speakers correlate to the segmentations of two fluent speakers of Māori is stronger among New Zealanders than non-New Zealanders. This research adds to the growing evidence that even in a largely ‘monolingual’ population, there is evidence of latent bilingualism through long-term exposure to a second 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

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