I am a PhD Candidate in my 6th year in the Linguistics program at Boston University. My research concerns how typically developing children and adults acquiring their first and second language(s) navigate the process of acquiring complex linguistic systems found in African languages and their implications for language development theories. I am also interested in examining what bilingual/multilingual speakers' experiences with their native languages reveal about their linguistic systems. I examine these questions with empirical data from understudied languages (such as Akan & Ga) spoken in Ghana. I rely on experimental and field data to address speech production and perception questions in the populations described above.