Language structure, attitudes, and learning from ambient exposure: Lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish among non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans. 2023

Simon Todd, and Chadi Ben Youssef, and Alonso Vásquez-Aguilar
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.

Recent work shows that ambient exposure in everyday situations can yield implicit knowledge of a language that an observer does not speak. We replicate and extend this work in the context of Spanish in California and Texas. In Word Identification and Wellformedness Rating experiments, non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans show implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish, which may be affected by both language structure and attitudes. Their knowledge of Spanish appears to be weaker than New Zealanders' knowledge of Māori established in recent work, consistent with structural differences between Spanish and Māori. Additionally, the strength of a participant's knowledge increases with the value they place on Spanish and its speakers in their state. These results showcase the power and generality of statistical learning of language in adults, while also highlighting how it cannot be divorced from the structural and attitudinal factors that shape the context in which it occurs.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007802 Language A verbal or nonverbal means of communicating ideas or feelings. Dialect,Dialects,Languages
D002140 California State bounded on the east by Nevada and Arizona, on the south by Mexico and the Pacific Ocean on the south and west, and on the north by Oregon.
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000328 Adult A person having attained full growth or maturity. Adults are of 19 through 44 years of age. For a person between 19 and 24 years of age, YOUNG ADULT is available. Adults
D001290 Attitude An enduring, learned predisposition to behave in a consistent way toward a given class of objects, or a persistent mental and/or neural state of readiness to react to a certain class of objects, not as they are but as they are conceived to be. Sentiment,Attitudes,Opinions,Opinion,Sentiments
D013781 Texas State bounded on the north by Oklahoma, on the east by Arkansas and Louisiana, on the south by Mexico, and on the west by New Mexico.
D019359 Knowledge The body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time, the cumulated sum of information, its volume and nature, in any civilization, period, or country. Epistemology

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