ABSTRACT
How do children develop the concepts that are expressed by the individual terms of human languages—concepts of objects such as dog, of events such as lunch, of actions such as jump, and of spatial relationships such as on? The most popular accounts of this ability root the development of concepts either in language itself or in perception. On the first of these accounts, children construct concepts such as dog or on by observing commonalities in the events to which speakers refer when they say dog or on. On the second of these accounts, the child's perceptual systems naturally are attuned to such commonalities. Accounts that appeal both to language experience and to perceptual biases also have been offered (e.g., Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1996).
