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.
