Navigating Variability: Language Development in Linguistically Diverse Environments

Over half of the world’s population is bilingual, meaning that most children grow up hearing multiple languages and/or accents. How do children navigate this input variability when acquiring their language(s)? In this thesis, I report three studies exploring this question in one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions in the world – the Greater Toronto Area. In Chapter 2, I report a large-scale study examining vocabulary development in children from a variety of language learning contexts. I replicate past findings reporting faster vocabulary development in monolingual children than bilingual children, while also revealing for the first time that exposure to substantial non-native input has no impact on vocabulary growth in monolingual children. In Chapter 3, I ask how linguistic experience shape toddlers’ speech processing. My findings demonstrate that monolinguals excel at processing the locally dominant variety of English, whereas bilinguals excel at adapting to unfamiliar varieties of English. And finally, in Chapter 4, I investigate how school-aged children process familiar and unfamiliar varieties of their native language. I found that monolingual and multilingual 4- to 6-year-olds process the locally dominant English variety similarly, but the larger English vocabularies of monolingual children gave them an edge over multilinguals in comprehending unfamiliar accent varieties. Together, these findings advance our understanding of how children in linguistically diverse environments handle speech variation in their input and suggest that they adapt by developing strategies that are fine-tuned to their own particular linguistic environment.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Fung, Priscilla Pui Yee

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Johnson, Elizabeth K

• Accent Adaptation
• Bilingualism
• Child Development
• Language Development
• Multi-Accent Acquisition
• Speech Processing

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/145010

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/145010