First Moral Vocabulary: Italian and Brazilian Toddlers Associate the Word ‘Good’ With Fair Distributors

This study examined whether, in the first two years of life, toddlers begin to map evaluative words onto sociomoral judgments. Across four experiments, we presented simple third-party distributive situations enacted with puppets and asked children ( N = 82) to identify “the good one.” In Experiments 1 and 2, Italian toddlers consistently selected the fair distributor, even when control conditions ruled out preferences for symmetry or one-to-one correspondences. In Experiment 3, however, they did not map the term “bad” onto the unfair distributor. In Experiment 4, the results of Experiment 1 were replicated on Brazilian toddlers, indicating a robust cross-cultural tendency to associate the word “good” with fair distributors. These results show that, by 2 years of age, children evaluate distributive actions and express their judgments through language. The findings point to an early link between the first moral vocabulary and social evaluations of distributive actions, offering new insight into how evaluative terms are acquired and how initial moral concepts become verbally accessible.