Bilingual experience has been shown to have early and basic effects on environmental exploration. For example, bilingual infants, as early as 6 months of age, demonstrate a preference for visual novelty in their environment, habituate faster to new information, and disengage more rapidly from familiar information to new information. In addition, bilingual infants show greater plasticity and flexibility in discrimination and perception of socially relevant signals (e.g., speech sounds, gaze following). In this talk, I will present a new framework for capturing adaptations associated with bilingual experience, with a focus on early experience with multiple languages. This framework is built on empirical evidence demonstrating fundamental variation in how bilingual learners explore and navigate their environment. I will provide evidence attesting to early shifts in perception and attention in bilingually-exposed infants, associating these early shifts with later learning, memory, and categorization. Finally, I will discuss ways in which this new framework can be submitted to further empirical testing and expanded upon.