Two studies were conducted to assess whether (a) the incidental presence of print facilitates the acquisition of oral vocabulary, (b) the facilitative effect of print ismoderated by phoneme-to-grapheme consistency, and (c) the findings obtained with monolingual children generalize to bilingual children. In total, 71 monolingual French-speaking children (Mage = 9 years 2 months) in Study 1 and 64 bilingual children (Mage = 9 years 3 months) in Study 2 participated in one of three conditions: consistent print, inconsistent print, or no print. Children were to learn novel labels for unfamiliar objects in a paired-associate paradigm. In both studies, print facilitated the acquisition and recall of expressive vocabulary. The effect of print consistency, however, varied across studies. As expected, monolingual children exposed to consistent print
learned more novel labels than children exposed to inconsistent
print. In contrast, bilingual children exposed to inconsistent print
learned and recalled more labels than children exposed to consistent
print. These intriguing findings might be due to differences
in attention allocation during training.