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 largescale 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 examines three-to six-year-old children's acquisition of the Spanish passive. This structure, a notoriously difficult concept for early learners, exhibits great variation in age of acquisition cross-linguistically. Spanish, with two passive constructions, is an ideal case study for the role of frequency in the development of the passive. This study utilizes data from CHIEDE, a spontaneous oral corpus spanning more than 20,000 words of child speech. Only a limited number of studies examining the passive have utilized spontaneous corpus data; as a result, it is unclear if lexical semantic patterns are due to experimental or task effect -an issue that only the inclusion of natural data can resolve. Results show that children only produce one of two possible forms of the Spanish passive. Their production is also limited to action verbs. Finally, while children as young as 3;0 produce the passive, cross-sectional data show the beginnings of a downward U-shaped developmental pattern. These results are explained in terms of acquisition by analogy as children utilize previously-acquired structures to create abstract syntactic representations.

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