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.

This investigation offers an analysis of the variation in the expression of purpose relations in a sample of 49 Amazonian languages. The most common strategies are conjunctions and converbs. Interestingly, in a number of Amazonian languages, positive purpose meanings are expressed with a conjunction or a converb in combination with other morphosyntactic properties. We briefly examine the areality of positive purpose clause-linkage patterns in four contact zones in the Amazonia: the Vaupés region, the Caquetá-Putumayo region, the Southern Guiana region, and the Marañon-Huallaga region. Besides analyzing the range of ways by which positive purpose clauses are realized in the sample, we also investigate avertive clauses in a number of languages of the database. Amazonian languages show an interesting typological picture in that they tend to have avertive markers which may be intraclausal or relational.