Non-te reo Māori speaking New Zealanders have a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the language, new research from the University of Canterbury has shown.
Researchers found non-Māori speakers in Aotearoa had very good knowledge of the patterns of sounds in the language that would seem to require memories of a surprisingly large number of words.
Non-Māori speaking Kiwis were also able to accurately distinguish real words from highly Māori-like non-words.
New Zealanders were regularly exposed to Te Reo Māori, including in place names, songs and in speeches that open and close meetings and official events, professor Jen Hay said.
“This makes it an interesting case study of what can be learned, without effort or awareness, from a small amount of regular exposure to a language,” Hay said.
In experiments where participants had to rate how much like Māori a variety of non-words were, non-Māori speakers were almost identical to fluent speakers.
“We eventually figured out that that non-Māori speaking adults in Aotearoa have implicit memories of over 1500 te reo Māori words, despite only knowing the meaning of about 70 to 80 on average,” Hay said.
“It is knowledge of these words that enables them to build up a rich understanding of the language’s sound patterns.”
The set of words that people have an implicit memory of without knowing their meaning is known as the ‘proto-lexicon’.
“Building a proto-lexicon is an important step in language acquisition for infants, but this study is the first real-world demonstration that adults can also have a large proto-lexicon of a language they are regularly exposed to,” Hay said.
The study was carried out with support from a $767,000 three-year grant from the Marsden Fund.
A second grant will fund research that will explore in more detail when this ‘proto-lexicon’ knowledge is acquired.
“We know that children acquire impressive knowledge about a language from small amounts of exposure,” Hay said.
“This seems to be an interesting example of adults’ brains operating in the same way but what we don’t yet know is how much exposure you need to the language to build this proto-lexicon, and whether you need to have actually grown up in New Zealand to have this knowledge.”
Hay will be work with children, and with people who have spent different phases of their life in New Zealand, to try and understand more about how the proto-lexicon develops.
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