Most people in New Zealand are exposed to the Māori language on a regular basis, but do not speak it. It has recently been claimed that this exposure leads them to create a large proto-lexicon, consisting of implicit memories of words and word parts, without semantic knowledge. This yields sophisticated phonotactic knowledge (Oh et al., 2020). This claim was supported by two tasks in which Non-Māori-Speaking New Zealanders: (i) Distinguished real words from phonotactically matched non-words, suggesting lexical knowledge; (ii) Gave wellformedness ratings of non-words almost indistinguishable from those of fluent Māori speakers, demonstrating phonotactic knowledge.Oh et al. (2020) ran these tasks on separate participants. While they hypothesised that phonotactic and lexical knowledge derived from the proto-lexicon, they did not establish a direct link between them. We replicate the two tasks, with improved stimuli, on the same set of participants. We find a statistically significant link between the tasks: Participants with a larger proto-lexicon (evidenced by performance in the Word Identification Task) show greater sensitivity to phonotactics in the Wellformedness Rating Task. This extends the previously reported results, increasing the evidence that exposure to a language you do not speak can lead to large-scale implicit knowledge about that language.

Existing nativized loanword studies have traditionally suggested that there are three epenthetic vowels in Japanese, which reflect both phonotactic restrictions and articulatory properties of certain consonant-vowel sequences in the language. Recent findings, however, call this tri-partite epenthesis pattern into question: First, several studies suggest that this epenthesis pattern is not true in the realm of perception and is not completely regular in production, and second, the relevant phonotactic restrictions seem to be weakening even outside of epenthesis contexts. This paper therefore investigates the extent to which the spontaneous choice of epenthetic vowels in the production of Japanese conforms to the traditional tri-partite pattern. Epenthesis was induced by presenting pseudo-word stimuli of the form of [aCCa] (C = a voiced consonant) to subjects orthographically. The findings suggest that indeed, the production pattern does not fully conform to what is generally reported for nativized loanwords; in particular, the traditionally "default" vowel [ɯ] is used by our participants frequently in all contexts, including the two where [o] or [i] is usually reported. That said, we also show that there is considerable variability across speakers as to which vowel is epenthesized, especially in the palatal context, and this variability includes tokens of vowels similar to all possible lexical vowels of Japanese.

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Previous research has shown that non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders have extensive latent knowledge of Māori, despite not being able to speak it. This knowledge plausibly derives from a memory store of Māori forms (Oh et al., 2020; Panther et al., 2023). Modelling suggests that this ‘proto-lexicon’ includes not only Māori words, but also word-parts; however, this suggestion has not yet been tested experimentally. We present the results of a new experiment in which non-Māori speaking New Zealanders and non-New Zealanders were asked to segment a range of Māori words into parts. We show that the degree to which segmentations of non-Māori speakers correlate to the segmentations of two fluent speakers of Māori is stronger among New Zealanders than non-New Zealanders. This research adds to the growing evidence that even in a largely ‘monolingual’ population, there is evidence of latent bilingualism through long-term exposure to a second language.