Quantifying Experience with Accented Speech to Study Monolingual and Bilingual School-Aged Children’s Speech Processing

Children around the world often grow up with multiple language varieties and are exposed to regional and second-language accents. This linguistic heterogeneity presents both benefits and challenges for cognitive and language development. Recognizing the importance of input variability in theories of language processing, researchers are now using more nuanced assessments of language experience that go beyond simple ‘monolingual’ versus ‘bilingual’ categories. These assessment methods capture the gradient nature of language exposure and use. This article provides a narrative review of recent research on the role of different accents and languages in children’s environments. It emphasizes the importance of applying gradient assessments of accent variation to both bilingual and monolingual populations. In doing so, a more comprehensive understanding of speech processing in heterogeneous contexts among school-aged children can be achieved.