Rethinking the Acquisition of Kinship Terms

Abstract

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.