This paper reconsiders the predominant views on the acquisition of kinship terms and
challenges the argument that the ontogenesis of these terms reflects global
processes of semantic development in which weakly constrained initial
representations evolve in discreet stages toward mature representations. Instead,
through a re-examination of existing experimental data, an alternative account of
kinship acquisition is offered which attributes to the child a significantly greater
native conceptual sophistication and argues that age-dependent advances in kinship
semantics are constrained by a priori hypotheses the child maintains about
human beings in groups rather than through changes in the capacity to handle logical
relations or semantic features.
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