1. Morphological segmentations of Non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders match proficient speakers
- Author
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Panther, Forrest, Mattingley, Wakayo, Hay, Jen, Todd, Simon, King, Jeanette, and Keegan, Peter J
- Subjects
Linguistics ,Biological Psychology ,Cognitive and Computational Psychology ,Language ,Communication and Culture ,Psychology ,Basic Behavioral and Social Science ,Behavioral and Social Science ,Bilingualism ,Maori ,Mental Lexicon ,Second Language Acquisition ,Morphology ,Phonology ,Implicit Learning ,Cognitive Sciences ,Experimental Psychology ,Cognitive and computational psychology - Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2024