Our paper on non-Māori speakers’ remarkable implicit knowledge of te reo Māori sound patterns and word-forms has just been published. ( http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78810-4) This was so much fun to work on. Here’s a summary. (1/9)

If you grow up in Aotearoa you are regularly exposed to small amounts of te reo Māori. Example contexts are songs, small speeches, greetings and formal event openings, for example. (2/9)

We know that babies start to learn what words in their languages sound like before they start knowing the meaning of those words. We wanted to know what non-Māori adults in NZ learn from the background exposure they have to te reo Māori. (3/9)

Te reo Māori, like all languages, has subtle statistical properties in terms of how sounds tend to combine into words. Some sounds like being near word beginnings, some prefer word endings and some sound pairs like to be close to each other (while others don’t!). (4/9)

To test knowledge of these patterns, we asked te reo Māori speakers, non-Māori-speakers in NZ, and non-Māori speakers in the US to rate a set of possible Māori words for how good they would be as potential words. (5/9)

Here is how the statistics from a Māori dictionary matches the three groups’ ratings. You might not be able to see the difference between the 2 NZ groups b/c they are right on top of each other! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78810-4/figures/2 (non-Māori speakers in NZ: red, Māori speakers: black). (6/9)

Why are non-Māori speaking NZers so good at this? We found evidence that it is because they have a large Māori proto-lexicon! A proto-lexicon is what babies acquire when first learning a language. The set of words that they know exist, but don’t yet know the meanings of. (7/9)

Non-Māori speakers in Aotearoa ‘know’ at least 1500 words and sub-word units. This is an amazing real-world example of implicit statistical language learning! (8/9)

As a language learner, it is also strangely reassuring to know that if I keep te reo Māori language media going in the background – even if I don’t understand it, my clever brain is busy analysing it and laying down preparatory word memories! (9/9)