Relational Reasoning Across Cultures: Consistency and Variation in South Korea, the United States, and China

A bstract 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. This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, where the US and China appear at opposite ends of a continuum, focusing on objects (US) versus relations (CN). This raises the possibility that differences in culture and language may shape variation in the development of abstract reasoning. Here, we examine the early development of relational reasoning in South Korea, a cultural and linguistic context that lies between the US and China. If environmental factors shape relational reasoning, we may therefore observe a distinct developmental trajectory in Korean children. We find that Korean 18–30-month-olds successfully infer the same relation, suggesting early consistency across the three contexts. Beginning at 3 years, however, Korean children show no evidence of cognitive bias, making them distinct from peers in both the US (object bias) and China (relational bias), but perform more similarly to US children, suggesting nuanced variation in abstract reasoning development across contexts.