The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and the saliency of nouns and verbs, crosslinguistic differences in acquisition were expected. Second, in the light of conceptual differences between the basic categories of nouns and verbs, category-specific effects were also expected. Of the children who participated in a naming study, 240 were German, 240 Korean, and 60 Turkish; 233 German and 99 additional German and Korean children were tested with a word-comprehension task. The target items were 36 nouns and 36 verbs, adapted for the three languages. The results are interpreted as evidence for both language-general tendencies and language-specific influences. Although the children were mostly better at processing nouns than verbs, the extent of this discrepancy differed across languages. The results also indicate more crosslinguistic variance in the case of nouns than in the case of verbs. The findings are discussed with respect to structural characteristics of the languages, developmental patterns in lexical acquisition, and characteristics of the task. (Contains 4 tables and 9 figures.)