Sensitivity to Spanish Phonotactic Constraints among English Monolinguals

Abstract

We investigated the implicit phonotactic constraints of adults who are incidentally exposed to a language in their ambient environment. People in south Texas have persistent exposure to Spanish due to strong historic, cultural, and economic ties to Mexico and Spanish speaking people. We show that people who self-identify as English monolinguals living in south Texas are able to judge the Spanish word-likeness of Spanish based nonwords just as well as self-identified Spanish-English bilinguals indicating that the English monolinguals living in south Texas have and utilize a non-negligible source of phonotactic knowledge of Spanish.