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Abstract Recent work suggests that the stereotype associating brilliance with men may underpin women's underrepresentation in prestigious careers, yet little is known about its development and consequences in non-Western contexts. The present research examined the onset of this stereotype and its relation to children's motivation in 5- to 7-year-old Korean children (N = 272, 50% girls, tested 2021 to 2022). At age 7, children attributed brilliance to men when evaluating Asians and Whites, and girls became less interested in participating in intellectually challenging tasks than boys. Notably, this gender difference in interest was mediated by children's endorsement of the stereotype. The generalizable early emergence of the gender brilliance stereotype and its detrimental implications press the need to tackle gender imbalance in early childhood. 

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children’s abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in which the verb occurred. The authors hypothesized that the properties of word order and argument drop, which vary systematically in these two languages, were driving the differences. In the current study, we pursued this finding to ask if the difference persists later in development, or if children acquiring different languages come to appear more similar as their linguistic knowledge and learning capacities increase. Preschool-aged monolingual English learners (N = 80) and monolingual Korean learners (N = 64) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that varied in word order and argument drop and accompanying visual stimuli. We assessed their learning by measuring accuracy in a forced-choice pointing task, and we measured eye gaze during the learning phase as an indicator of the processes by which they mapped the novel verbs to meaning. Unlike previous studies which identified differences between English and Korean learning 2-year-olds in a similar task, our results revealed similarities between the two language groups with these older preschoolers. We interpret our results as evidence that over the course of early childhood, children become adept at learning from a large variety of contexts, such that differences between learners of different languages are attenuated.