Jen Hay is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and director of the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour. She has broad research interests, encompassing topics in sociolinguistics, phonetics, morphology, laboratory phonology and New Zealand English.
Exploring an Adult Protolexicon: Implicit Language Learning from the Ambient Environment
Laboratory studies with infants and adults have shown the impressive ability humans have to extract statistical patterns from artificial languages. However artificial languages cannot fully account for the complexity and noise of natural languages, and laboratory settings do not resemble natural learning environments. In our work, instead of providing an artificial language learning environment, we investigate the knowledge of a real language among adults who do not speak it but have been exposed to it over years of daily life. Specifically, we investigate the knowledge of Māori among adult New Zealanders. Most New Zealanders do not speak Māori, yet are regularly exposed to it in their ambient environment, though songs, greetings, speeches, and other formal events. How much does this exposure lead them to learn about Māori? Across a series of experiments, we have shown that non-Māori speaking New Zealanders have built up remarkable knowledge of Māori – a large ‘proto-lexicon’ of implicit memories of words, and sophisticated knowledge of the probabilities of different sound sequences in the language. This talk summarizes the experiments we have done so far, the possible consequences, and our current research on this topic.
