UC Santa Barbara

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.