Human kinship systems play a central role in social organization, as anthropologists have long demonstrated. Much less is known about how cultural schemas of relatedness are transmitted across generations. How do children learn kinship concepts? To what extent is learning affected by known cross-cultural variation in how humans classify kin? This review draws on research in developmental psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to present our current understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of kinship categorization. Amid growing interest in kinship in the cognitive sciences, the paper aims to stimulate new research on the ontogeny of kinship categorization, a rich domain for studying the nexus of language, culture, and cognition. We introduce an interdisciplinary research toolkit to help streamline future research in this area.

正如人类学家长期以来所证明的那样，人类亲属系统在社会组织中发挥着核心作用。关于相关性的文化图式是如何跨代传递的，人们知之甚少。孩子如何学习亲属关系概念？在人类如何分类亲属方面，已知的跨文化变异对学习的影响有多大？本综述借鉴了发展心理学、语言学和人类学的研究，以展示我们目前对亲属分类的社会和认知基础的理解。随着认知科学中对亲属关系的兴趣日益浓厚，本文旨在激发对亲属关系分类个体发育的新研究，这是一个研究语言、文化和认知关系的丰富领域。我们引入了一个跨学科的研究工具包，以帮助简化该领域的未来研究。