The goal of this study was to explore whether viewing the speaker's articulatory gestures contributes to lexical access in children (ages 5-10) and in adults. We conducted a vowel monitoring task with words and pseudo-words in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with white noise masking the acoustic signal. The results indicated that children clearly benefited from visual speech from age 6-7 onwards. However, unlike adults, the word superiority effect was not greater in the AV than the AO condition in children, suggesting that visual speech mostly contributes to phonemic--rather than lexical--processing during childhood, at least until the age of 10. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)