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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