Morphological segmentations of Non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders match proficient speakers

Abstract 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.