Relations are also fundamental to any account of linguistic semantics.
Despite the importance of relations in understanding cognition and language and despite the dogged and continuing work of psychologists, linguists, and philosophers on the problem, there is no well-accepted account of the origins of relations. This chapter addresses this question by considering the psychological evidence on how children acquire relations and relational language and by proposing a computational model. The plan of the chapter is as follows. First, we consider past proposals of how relations are represented and the implications of these representational ideas for development. Second, we review the developmental evidence in the context of five psychological facts about relations that must be explained by any account of their origin.