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Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a "relational shift," over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task (Carstensen et al., 2019). This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, in which English speakers in the US and Mandarin speakers in China appear at opposite ends of a continuum spanning from a focus on objects (US) to relations (CN). We explore early relational reasoning in a context that represents a cultural middle ground with a key linguistic similarity (noun spurts) to the US: Korean-learning children in South Korea. In two experiments with 262 Korean children, we document relational reasoning in this novel cultural context, revealing similarities and differences to developmental trajectories in the US and China.

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and languages. Very little evidence has accumulated on infants learning languages spoken in Asia, which accounts for most of the world's population. The present study examined the developmental trajectory of Korean‐learning infants' sensitivity to a native stop contrast during the first year of life. The Korean language utilizes unusual voiceless three‐way stop categories, requiring target categories to be derived from tight phonetic space. Further, two of these categories—lenis and aspirated—have undergone a diachronic change in recent decades as the primary acoustic cue for distinction has shifted among modern speakers. Consequently, the input distributions of these categories are mixed across speakers and speech styles, requiring learners to build flexible representations of target categories along these variations. The results showed that among the three age groups—4–6 months, 7–9 months, and 10–12 months—we tested, only 10–12‐month‐olds showed weak sensitivity to the two categories, suggesting that robust discrimination is not in place by the end of the first year. The study adds scarcely represented data, lending additional support for the lack of early sensitivity and prolonged emergence of native phonology that are inconsistent with learners of predominant studies and calls for more diverse samples to verify the generality of the typical perceptual narrowing pattern. Research Highlights: We investigated Korean‐learning infants' developmental trajectory of native phoneme categories and whether they show the typical perceptual narrowing pattern.Robust discrimination did not appear until 12 months, suggesting that Korean infants' native phonology is not stabilized by the end of the first year.The prolonged emergence of sensitivity could be due to restricted phonetic space and input variations but suggests the possibility of a different developmental trajectory.The current study contributes scarcely represented Korean‐learning infants' phonetic discrimination data to the speech development field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although children generally regard adults as more knowledgeable than their peers, an informant's past accuracy trumps age when in conflict. In a recent study, however, Korean 5‐year‐olds were more likely to trust a less accurate adult informant over a more accurate peer informant when learning new information. To examine whether such a pattern was attributable to the cultural influence of shaping early respect for the elderly among Korean children, a pattern of selective label endorsement was examined among Canadian 5‐year‐olds, who were raised under different cultural values, relatively putting less emphasis on social relationships than individual expressions (Experiment 1). We also investigated Korean 6–7‐year‐olds' selective endorsement pattern when the informant's past accuracy conflicted with the informant's age to examine how cultural influences shift as children develop (Experiment 2). When the adult was 25% accurate in labeling familiar objects, relative to the 75% accurate child informant, Canadian 5‐year‐olds tended to endorse the label offered by the child, demonstrating a prioritization of the epistemic cue over the social cue. By comparison, Korean 6–7‐year‐olds were equally likely to choose between two informants, showing difficulty disregarding inaccurate adults, even when they always mislabeled familiar objects. These results offer insight into cultural influences on the development of selective word learning and suggest the relative weighing of social and epistemic cues evolves with development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These findings are notable for their striking similarities with findings from children parsing English; however, in those and other studies of English, children were found to be reluctant to use late-arriving syntactic evidence to override earlier verb-based cues to structure, whereas here Korean children were reluctant to use late-arriving verb-based cues to override earlier syntactic evidence. The findings implicate a general cross-linguistic pattern for parsing development in which late-developing cognitive control abilities mediate the recovery from so-called "garden path" sentences. Children's limited cognitive control prevents them from inhibiting misinterpretations even when the disambiguating evidence comes from highly informative verb information. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.