Language structure, attitudes, and learning from ambient exposure: Lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish among non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans

Recent work shows that ambient exposure in everyday situations can yield implicit knowledge of a language that an observer does not speak. We replicate and extend this work in the context of Spanish in California and Texas. In Word Identification and Wellformedness Rating experiments, non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans show implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish, which may be affected by both language structure and attitudes. Their knowledge of Spanish appears to be weaker than New Zealanders’ knowledge of Māori established in recent work, consistent with structural differences between Spanish and Māori. Additionally, the strength of a participant’s knowledge increases with the value they place on Spanish and its speakers in their state. These results showcase the power and generality of statistical learning of language in adults, while also highlighting how it cannot be divorced from the structural and attitudinal factors that shape the context in which it occurs.