The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

The prevalence of behavioral inhibition in toddlers was examined in five cultures. Participants in this study included 110 Australian, 108 Canadian, 151 Chinese, 104 Italian, and 113 South Korean toddlers and their mothers who were observed during a structured observational laboratory session. Matched procedures were used in each country, with children encountering an unfamiliar stranger with a truck and a robot. Indicators of inhibition included the length of time toddlers delayed before approaching the stranger and the duration of contact with their mother while the stranger was in the room. Results were generally consistent with expectations and showed differences between eastern and western cultures; Italian and Australian toddlers were less inhibited than toddlers from the other countries, whereas Chinese and South Korean toddlers were more inhibited. The implications of these findings are discussed and a research agenda for further exploration of inhibition is outlined.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the proactive socialisation beliefs (goals, attributions, strategies) of Korean mothers regarding preschoolers’ social skills (sharing, controlling negative emotions, and helping others). Participants were 116 mothers in Seoul, Korea. The reasons that mothers provided for the importance of each skill, their causal attributions for the acquisition of those skills, and the socialisation strategies that would be most effective, were targeted. Korean mothers rated controlling negative emotions as less important than sharing and helping others, and were least likely to attribute the importance of social skills to social conventional reasons and provide different ratings and reasons, for the importance of children’s skills depending on the sex of their child. Specifically, mothers posit more moral reasons for girls, but more developmental reasons for boys. Also, Korean mothers made more external causal attributions than internal attributions for being good at sharing and helping, whereas emotion regulation was thought to be equally a factor of external and internal reasons. In terms of socialisation strategies, Korean mothers endorsed a higher proportion of modelling than any other strategy for the socialisation of all three social skills, regardless of the sex of the child. In conclusion, Korean mothers’ beliefs were related to both traditional and modern Korean ideologies and values in meaningful ways. This study highlights the significance of cultural ideologies regarding children and the family in the study of maternal beliefs regarding child socialisation.

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