New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, NZILBB, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, 8140, New Zealand.
Department of French Language and Literature, Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea.
Sci Rep. 2020 Dec 18;10(1):22318. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-78810-4.
We investigate implicit vocabulary learning by adults who are exposed to a language in their ambient environment. Most New Zealanders do not speak Māori, yet are exposed to it throughout their lifetime. We show that this exposure leads to a large proto-lexicon - implicit knowledge of the existence of words and sub-word units without any associated meaning. Despite not explicitly knowing many Māori words, non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders are able to access this proto-lexicon to distinguish Māori words from Māori-like nonwords. What's more, they are able to generalize over the proto-lexicon to generate sophisticated phonotactic knowledge, which lets them evaluate the well-formedness of Māori-like nonwords just as well as fluent Māori speakers.
我们研究了成年人在环境中接触语言时的隐性词汇学习。大多数新西兰人不说毛利语，但他们一生都在接触毛利语。我们的研究表明，这种接触会导致一种原始词汇表的产生，即对单词和子单词单元的存在有隐性的认识，而无需任何相关的意义。尽管非毛利语使用者并不明确知道许多毛利语单词，但他们能够访问这个原始词汇表，从而将毛利语单词与毛利语类似的非单词区分开来。更重要的是，他们能够在原始词汇表上进行概括，生成复杂的语音规则知识，这使他们能够像流利的毛利语使用者一样评估毛利语类似的非单词的正确性。
