Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Apr 27;18(4):e0284919. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284919. eCollection 2023.
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.
最近的研究表明，日常生活环境中的接触也能让观察者在不使用某种语言的情况下，获得这种语言的隐性知识。我们在加利福尼亚州和得克萨斯州的西班牙语环境中对这一发现进行了复制和扩展。在词汇识别和规范度评分实验中，不说西班牙语的加利福尼亚人和得克萨斯人表现出对西班牙语词汇和语音结构的隐性知识，而这种知识可能同时受到语言结构和态度的影响。他们对西班牙语的了解似乎不如最近研究中新西兰人对毛利语的了解，这与西班牙语和毛利语之间的结构差异一致。此外，参与者对西班牙语及其使用者的重视程度越高，他们对西班牙语的了解就越深入。这些结果展示了成人对语言进行统计学习的强大功能和普遍性，同时也强调了这种学习不能脱离塑造语言发生环境的结构和态度因素。
