Naming and biological concepts 1 Running Head: NAMING AND BIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS Naming Practices and the Acquisition of Key Biological Concepts: Evidence from English and Indonesian

Naming and biological concepts 2 We examined Indonesian- and English-speaking children’s acquisition of biological concepts (LIVING THING, HUMAN, NON-HUMAN ANIMAL, PLANT), their names, and the relations among them. In English, but not Indonesian, the name ‘animal ’ is polysemous: one sense includes both human and non-human animals; the other excludes humans. Children are sensitive to the naming practices of their respective communities (Experiment 1). These cross-linguistic differences in naming are also reflected in children’s categorization of biological entities in both spontaneous (Experiment 2) and structured (Experiment 3) tasks. Children in both populations appreciate an inclusive concept LIVING THING. However, they have some difficulty working out the relation between this concept and its constituents. This difficulty is especially evident in English and appears to be related to the polysemy of ‘animal’. This work underscores the importance of language and cultural factors in the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world. Naming and biological concepts