Abstract
Tuhinga Whakarāpopoto
I tuhia i Oh mā (2020), he nui te mōhiotanga huna o te reo Māori o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori e noho ana i Aotearoa. He nui te puna kupu tuatahi, arā, ko ngā kupu tikanga kore e mōhiotia ai. He nui hoki te mōhiotanga ororeo raupapa, he pūnaha tō rātou me pēhea te noho o ngā oro i te reo Māori. I tēnei pepa ka kitea ētahi putanga anō mō te mōhiotanga whakahirahira o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori. E rua ngā whakamātau i mahia. Ko te kaupapa o te whakamātau tuatahi ko te mōhiotanga wetereo ā-kupu. Ko ngā kitenga: he nui te mōhiotanga wetereo ā-kupu. Ka mōhio pai ngā tāngata kore kōrero ki ngā ngota kupu o te reo Māori. Kei te mōhio hoki rātou kei hea ngā wehenga tino pai mō te whakawehe ngota kupu, arā, ka mōhio rātou i te tikanga mō te wehenga a muri i te mora tuarua. Ko te kaupapa o te whakamātau tuarua ko te mōhiotanga wetereo ā-rerenga. Ko ngā kitenga: kei te mōhio hoki te hunga kore kōrero Māori ki ētahi mea e pā ana ki te wetereo ā-rerenga. I te nuinga o te wā he pai ake ki a rātou tētahi rerenga tika i tētahi rerenga hē. Nō reira, ahakoa kāore e kōrerotia te reo Māori e te nuinga o ngā tāngata e noho ana i Aotearoa, he mīharo kē ō rātou mōhiotanga e pā ana ki ngā kupu, ki ngā ororeo, ki ngā wetereo ā-kupu, me ngā wetereo ā-rerenga hoki o te reo Māori. He tauira pai tēnei o te mōhiotanga huna ka taea i te ao tūroa.
English Abstract
This article outlines recent experiments on the implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers living in New Zealand. It expands on the work of Oh et al. (2020) who show that, despite not knowing the language, non-Māori speakers have impressive phonotactic and lexical knowledge, which has presumably been built through ambient exposure to the language. In this paper, we extend this work by investigating morphological and syntactic knowledge. Experiment 1 asks non-Māori speakers to morphologically segment Māori words. It shows that they have an impressive degree of ability to recognize Māori morphs, and also that their false segmentations are in the locations that are phonotactically most likely to be morpheme boundaries. Experiment 2 asks non-Māori speakers to rate the likelihood that Māori sentences are grammatical. They rate grammatical Māori sentences significantly higher than matched sentences containing the same words in the wrong order. Their error patterns reveal significant sensitivity to legal versus non-legal sentence endings. Taken together, the results reveal that ambient exposure to te reo Māori leads to extensive subconscious knowledge regarding te reo Māori, and provide a strong real-world example of implicit language learning.