The ability to control attention – by inhibiting pre-potent, yet no longer relevant information – is an essential skill in all of human learning, and increasing evidence suggests that this ability is enhanced in language learning environments in which the learner is managing and using more than one language. One question waiting to be addressed is whether such efficient attentional control plays a role in word learning. That is, children who must manage two languages also must manage to learn two languages and the advantages of more efficient attentional control may benefit aspects of language learning within each language. This study compared bilingual and monolingual children’s performances in an artificial word-learning task and in a non-linguistic task that measures attention control. Three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with similar vocabulary development participated in these tasks. The results replicate earlier work showing advanced attentional control among bilingual children and suggest that this better attentional control may also benefit better performance in novel adjective learning. The findings provide the first direct evidence of a relation between performances in an artificial word-learning task and in an attentional control task. We discuss this finding with respect to the general relevance of attentional control for lexical learning in all children and with respect to current views of bilingual children’s word learning.

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool children in the two cultures. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds from the two cultures (N = 64) participated in a relational match-to-standard task in two conditions, with simple or richly detailed objects, in which a focus on individual objects may hurt performance. Rich objects, consistent with past research, strongly limited the performance of U.S. children but not Japanese children. In Experiment 2, U.S. and Japanese 4-year-olds (N = 72) participated in a visual search task that required them to find a specific object in a cluttered, but organized as a scene, visual field in which object-centric attention might be expected to aid performance and relational attentional pattern may hinder the performance because of relational structure that was poised by the scene. U.S. children outperformed Japanese children. In Experiment 3, 4-year-olds from both cultures (N = 36) participated in a visual search task that was similar to Experiment 2 but with randomly placed objects, where there should not be a difference between the performance of two cultures because the relational structure that may be posed by the scene is eliminated. This double-dissociation is discussed in terms of implications for different developmental trajectories, with different developmental subtasks in the two cultures.

A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while Easterners often integrate their judgment of the focal object with surrounding contextual cues. There are few studies of whether such cultural differences are evident in children. This study examined 48 monolingual Japanese-speaking children residing in Japan and 48 monolingual English-speaking children residing in the U.S.A. (40 to 60 month-olds) in a task asking children to complete a picture by adding the proper emotional expression to a face. The key variable was the context and shift in context from the preceding trial for the same pictured individual. Japanese children were much more likely to shift their judgments with changes in context whereas children from the United States treated facial expression in a more trait-like manner, maintaining the same expression for the individual across contexts.

Recent research indicates that culture penetrates fundamental processes of perception and cognition (e.g. Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). Here, we provide evidence that these influences begin early and influence how preschool children recognize common objects. The three tasks (n=128) examined the degree to which nonface object recognition by 3 year olds was based on individual diagnostic features versus more configural and holistic processing. Task 1 used a 6-alternative forced choice task in which children were asked to find a named category in arrays of masked objects in which only 3 diagnostic features were visible for each object. U.S. children outperformed age-matched Japanese children. Task 2 presented pictures of objects to children piece by piece. U.S. children recognized the objects given fewer pieces than Japanese children and likelihood of recognition increased for U.S., but not Japanese children when the piece added was rated by both U.S. and Japanese adults as highly defining. Task 3 used a standard measure of configural progressing, asking the degree to which recognition of matching pictures was disrupted by the rotation of one picture. Japanese children’s recognition was more disrupted by inversion than was that of U.S. children, indicating more configural processing by Japanese than U.S. children. The pattern suggests early cross-cultural differences in visual processing; findings that raise important questions about how visual experiences differ across cultures and about universal patterns of cognitive development.

Much research evidences a system in adults and young children for approximately representing quantity. Here we provide evidence that the bias to attend to discrete quantity versus other dimensions may be mediated by set size and culture. Preschool-age English-speaking children in the United States and Japanese-speaking children in Japan were tested in a match-to-sample task where number was pitted against cumulative surface area in both large and small numerical set comparisons. Results showed that children from both cultures were biased to attend to the number of items for small sets. Large set responses also showed a general attention to number when ratio difficulty was easy. However, relative to the responses for small sets, attention to number decreased for both groups; moreover, both U.S. and Japanese children showed a significant bias to attend to total amount for difficult numerical ratio distances, although Japanese children shifted attention to total area at relatively smaller set sizes than U.S. children. These results add to our growing understanding of how quantity is represented and how such representation is influenced by context--both cultural and perceptual.