Children have an early ability to learn and comprehend words, a skill that develops as they age. A critical question remains regarding what drives this development. Maturation-based theories emphasize cognitive maturity as a driver of comprehension, while accumulator theories emphasize children’s accumulation of language experiences over time. In this study we used archival looking-while-listening data from 155 bilingual and monolingual children (14–48 months) to evaluate the relative contributions of maturation and experience. We compared four statistical models of noun learning: maturation only, experience only, additive (maturation plus experience), and accumulator (maturation times experience). The best-fitting model was the additive model in which both maturation (age) and experience were independent contributors to noun comprehension: older children as well as children who had more experience with the target language were more accurate and efficient in the looking-while-listening task. A 25% change in relative language exposure was equivalent to a 4 month change in age. Whereas accumulator models predict that bilinguals should fall further and further behind monolinguals in their lexical development, our results indicate that bilinguals are buffered against effects of reduced exposure in each language. We argue that continuous-level measures from individual children’s looking-while-listening data, gathered from children with a range of language experience, provide a powerful window into lexical development.

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Bilingualism is hard to define, measure, and study. Sparked by the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, a recent discussion on the advantages of open science is gaining momentum. Here, we join this debate to argue that bilingualism research would greatly benefit from embracing open science. We do so in a unique way, by presenting six fictional stories that illustrate how open science practices – sharing preprints, materials, code, and data; pre-registering studies; and joining large-scale collaborations – can strengthen bilingualism research and further improve its quality.

Phoneme perception varies across languages, as listeners of different languages use the same phonetic cues differently to determine which phoneme they are hearing. This raises the question of how bilinguals perceive phonemes in each of their languages. Previous research has found that bilinguals are able to perceive phonemes in a language-specific manner based on cues such as voice onset time, but this work has mostly tested listeners’ perception of syllables and non-words. This pre-registered study examined bilingual adults’ phoneme perception while hearing real, full words in both of their languages. Bilinguals’ perception shifted to some degree based on what language they were hearing, supporting the idea of language-specific perception. However, by far the greatest influence on perception was lexical knowledge, whereby bilinguals were more likely to report hearing the sound that resulted in a real word regardless of language context (e.g., reporting they heard “puppy” even when it was phonetically realized as “buppy”, also known as the Ganong effect). These findings highlight how more ecologically valid studies can enrich our understanding of bilinguals’ phoneme perception.

Bilingualism is hard to define, measure, and study. Sparked by the so-called replication crisis in the social sciences, a recent discussion on the advantages of open science is gaining momentum. Here we join this debate to argue that bilingualism research would greatly benefit from embracing open science. We do so in a unique way, by presenting six fictional stories that illustrate how open science practices — sharing preprints, materials, code, and data; pre-registering studies; and joining large-scale collaborations — can strengthen bilingualism research and further improve its quality.