Identifying familiar words fast and precisely eases acquiring novel words, as well as other aspects of language acquisition. This inquiry employed the visual world paradigm with semantic and phonological competitors to study lexical processing efficiency in 2- to 5-year-old children. Experiment 1 found this paradigm was sensitive to vocabulary-size differences. Experiment 2 covered a more diverse group of children who were tested in their native dialect (either African American English or mainstream American English). No effect of stimulus dialect was perceived. The results displayed that vocabulary size was a better predictor of eye gaze patterns than was maternal education, but that maternal education level had a mitigating effect; as maternal education level raised, vocabulary size was less predictive of lexical processing efficiency.