You learn a lot about languages used around you. How much depends on the language and your attitude.

What is it about?

Young children start to learn a language just by hearing it around them. Through regular listening, they figure out what that language "sounds like" and what some of its words are, before they really know what those words mean. Our research suggests that adults can do the same: Californians and Texans who see and hear a lot of Spanish, but don't speak it, can identify whether or not something is a real Spanish word, and how "Spanish-like" a made-up word is.

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Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work is important because it applies the idea of learning-by-listening to real language in the world, whereas most other research in this area is restricted to artificial language in the laboratory. It also shows that our previous results, which found the same pattern with New Zealanders who don't speak Māori (the Indigenous language), were more general than just being about New Zealanders or Māori. This work is also stands out because it starts to dig into some of the reasons why there are differences in how much someone learns by listening. One reason is language structure: Californians and Texans seem to have weaker knowledge of Spanish than New Zealanders do of Māori, which is consistent with differences in the way words are built in Spanish and Māori. Another reason is attitudes: Californians and Texans with positive attitudes toward Spanish and its speakers show more knowledge than those with negative attitudes. These reasons have not been thoroughly explored in previous work, but they have the potential to tell us a lot about how language works in the mind, and to help us better support language learning in the world.