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Non-Maori-speaking New Zealanders have surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the language, new research from the University of Canterbury has shown.
The Kiwis were regularly exposed to Maori tea, including in place names, songs and in speeches that open and close meetings and official events, said Professor Jen Hay. Source: 1 NEWS
The researchers found that non-Maori speakers in Aotearoa had very good knowledge of sound patterns in the language that would seem to require recall of a surprisingly large number of words.
Kiwis who did not speak Maori were also able to accurately distinguish real words from non-words very similar to Maori.
New Zealanders were regularly exposed to Te Reo Māori, including in place names, songs and speeches that open and close official meetings and events, said Professor Jen Hay.
“This makes for an interesting case study of what can be learned, effortlessly or conscientiously, from a little regular exposure to a language,” Hay said.
In experiments in which participants had to assess how similar a variety of non-words were to Maori, non-Maori speakers were nearly identical to fluent speakers.
“Over time we realized that non-Maori speaking adults in Aotearoa have implicit memories of more than 1,500 te reo Maori words, even though they only know the meaning of between 70 and 80 on average,” Hay said.
“It is the knowledge of these words that allows them to develop a rich understanding of the sound patterns of the language.”
The set of words of which people have an implicit memory without knowing their meaning is known as “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 for a language they are familiar with. exposed regularly, “Hay said.
The study was carried out with the support of a three-year grant of $ 767,000 from the Marsden Fund.
A second grant will fund research that will explore in more detail when this “proto-lexical” knowledge is acquired.
“We know that children gain impressive knowledge of a language from small amounts of exposure,” Hay said.
“This seems to be an interesting example of how the adult brain works in the same way, but what we still don’t know is how much exposure you need to language to build this proto-lexicon and if you really need to have grown up. in New Zealand to have this knowledge. “
Hay will work with children and with people who have spent different stages of their life in New Zealand, to try to understand more about how the proto-lexicon develops.
