Language structure, attitudes, and learning from ambient exposure: Lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish among non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans.

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.