AJSLP Research Article Language Exposure in Bilingual Toddlers: Performance on Nonword Repetition and Lexical Tasks Myrto Brandeker a and Elin Thordardottir a Purpose: The amount of language exposure is correlated with bilingual lexical development, but findings are mixed on how exposure relates to nonword repetition (NWR), a complex skill involving both short-term processing and long-term vocabulary knowledge. We extend previous work to a younger age group by investigating the role of exposure on NWR versus vocabulary, along with the effect of item construction and scoring. Method: Sixty typically developing children (ages 2;5–3;6 [years;months]) were assessed for NWR and receptive and expressive vocabulary. Participants ranged in amount of previous exposure to English and French from 0% to 100% and were tested in both languages if able to participate, even with very limited exposure (28 completed testing in both languages, 11 completed testing in English only, 21 completed testing in French only). Results: Correlational analyses showed moderate to strong associations between the amount of exposure and vocabulary in that language, whereas the relationship of exposure with NWR was weak or nonsignificant, depending on scoring method. NWR correlated with vocabulary in English only. Performance on NWR was affected by nonword length but unaffected by wordlikeness. Conclusions: NWR and vocabulary were differently related to language exposure. The underlying mechanisms of NWR at this age appeared mainly reliant on short-term processes, in contrast to long-term vocabulary knowledge. B ilingual children develop their languages in a diver- sity of language environments, in different language domains, and with variation in both quantity and quality of language input. How variation in amount of lan- guage exposure, an inherent feature of bilingualism, affects bilingual language development reveals information not only about how different language skills develop in bilin- gual children but also about how language processes inter- act and function. A strong relationship has been found between language exposure and bilingual lexical development (e.g., de Houwer, 2007; Pearson, 2007; Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, & Oller, 1997; Scheele, Leseman, & Mayo, 2010). Elin Thordardottir (2011) conducted an in-depth examination of the impact of language exposure on bilingual language development in simultaneous bilingual 5-year-olds. Using fine-grained measures of the amount of language exposure since birth, she found a strong and systematic relationship between the overall amount of exposure and performance scores on standardized lexical tasks. Similarly, our recent study used the same methodology to examine the effect of language exposure on nonword repetition (NWR) in the same sample of bilingual 5-year-olds (Elin Thordardottir & Brandeker, 2013). We found that the amount of language exposure affects NWR far less than it does vocabulary. NWR has been found to correlate with vocabulary knowl- edge (see the review in Coady & Evans, 2008). Even though there is an established relationship between vocabulary and language exposure in bilingual chil- dren, studies on how NWR is affected by language exposure have yielded mixed findings. There is support both for (e.g., Summers, Bohman, Gillam, Peña, & Bedore, 2010; Thorn & Gathercole, 1999) and against (e.g., Elin Thordardottir & Brandeker, 2013; Elin Thordardottir & Anna Gudrun Juliusdottir, 2012) an effect of language exposure on NWR. It is somewhat unclear what NWR explicitly measures, and although processing skills are instrumental, vocabulary knowledge is implicated as well. In the case of bilingual children, whose vocabulary knowledge is divided between the two languages, the processing ability might still be a McGill University and Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation du Montréal métropolitain (CRIR), Montreal, Quebec, Canada Correspondence to Myrto Brandeker: myrto.brandeker@mail.mcgill.ca Editor: Krista Wilkinson Associate Editor: Barbara Rodriguez Received August 20, 2013 Revision received January 30, 2014 Accepted February 5, 2015 DOI: 10.1044/2015_AJSLP-13-0106 Disclosure: The authors have declared that no competing interests existed at the time of publication. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 24 • 126–138 • May 2015 • Copyright © 2015 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 126