English-speaking adults often recruit a "mental timeline" to represent events from left-to-right (LR), but its developmental origins are debated. Here, we test whether preschoolers prefer ordered linear representations of events and whether they prefer culturally conventional directions. English-speaking adults (n = 85) and 3- to…

This study identified changes in Korean and heritage language proficiencies across five waves (2011-2015) and examined the association between linguistic acculturation trajectories and adjustment (2016) among Korean adolescents with immigrant family backgrounds (N = 1441; 51.21% female; M[subscript age(baseline)] = 9.97). All adolescents were from…

Adolescent hope can promote the emotional and behavioral well-being of Latinx families. Positive family functioning may foster adolescent hope, whereas cultural stress may compromise adolescent hope and well-being. We examined how adolescent hope changed over time, and whether cultural stress and family functioning predicted emotional and…

This study investigated ethnic-racial identity (ERI) developmental processes (i.e., exploration and resolution) as pathways for adolescents to develop global bicultural competence, or the ability to meet heritage and host cultural demands. The sample included 749 U.S. Mexican-origin youth (30% Mexico-born; 51% male) followed from early-to-late…

This study investigated the associations between cultural diversity approaches endorsed by teachers and adolescents' positive and negative intergroup contact in schools. Participants were 984 adolescents (M[subscript age] = 14.66; 62.7% female; 24.8% ethnic minority) involved in a three-wave longitudinal study between 2019 and 2020. Results…

Social contexts shape the development of attention; however, little is known about joint attention beyond infancy. This study employed behavioral and eye-tracking measurements to investigate cultural variations in how caregivers direct 3- to 4-year-old children's attention and subsequent changes in children's attention to objects and contextual…

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

This article provides an estimation of how frequently, and from whom, children aged 0-11 years (Ns between 9 and 24) receive one-on-one verbal input among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Analyses of systematic daytime behavioral observations reveal < 1 min per daylight hour is spent talking to children younger than 4 years…

When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of…

This study of 241 parent-child dyads from the United Kingdom (N = 120, M[subscript age] = 3.92, SD = 0.53) and Hong Kong (N = 121, M[subscript age] = 3.99, SD = 0.50) breaks new ground by adopting a cross-cultural approach to investigate children's theory of mind and parental mind-mindedness. Relative to the Hong Kong sample, U.K. children showed…

The current study used a novel methodology based on multivocal ethnography to assess the relations between conformity and evaluations of intelligence and good behavior among Western (U.S.) and non-Western (Ni-Vanuatu) children (6- to 11-year-olds) and adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds; N = 256). Previous research has shown that U.S. adults were…

This study examined future-oriented behavior in children (3-6 years; N = 193) from three diverse societies--one industrialized Western city and two small, geographically isolated communities. Children had the opportunity to prepare for two alternative versions of an immediate future event over six trials. Some 3-year-olds from all cultures…

How does early social experience affect children's inferences and exploration? Following prior work on children's reasoning in pedagogical contexts, this study examined U.S. children with less experience in formal schooling and Yucatec Mayan children whose early social input is predominantly observational. In Experiment 1, U.S. 2-year-olds…

Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a…

This study explored how overimitation and collaboration interact in 3- to 6-year-old children in Westernized (N = 48 in Experiment 1; N = 26 in Experiment 2) and Indigenous Australian communities (N = 26 in Experiment 2). Whether working in pairs or on their own rates of overimitation did not differ. However, when the causal functions of modeled…