Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and RECEPTIVE and EXPRESSIVE language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the AMOUNT of children's exposure to two languages and the RATIO of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.
This work was made possible through the exceptional patience and interest of the participants, their families, and their teachers. Special thanks also to Ana Torres and René Iglesias. Sue Eldred-Kujawa hand-sewed all of the children's shirt pockets to house the recorders. Additionally, the author gratefully acknowledges feedback from the following individuals who helped to improve this work: Keith Johnson, Sharon Inkelas, Mahesh Srinivasan, Jan Edwards, Alex Cristia, Adriana Weisleder, Anele Villaneuva, Zach Maher, and Andrew Cheng, as well as associate editor Carmel O'Shannessy, editor John Beavers, and two anonymous referees. This article also benefited from numerous audience comments and questions at the 177th and 178th meetings of the Acoustical Society of America, the 94th and 95th annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, and the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.