To what extent does the development of conceptual categories depend on language?

Does the development of conceptual categories depend on syntactic and lexical features of a language? As part of a larger project we studied the comprehension of the (cross-linguistic equivalent of the English) quantifiers ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘some’, ‘some…not’, and ‘most’, by 5-year-old children (n=606) and adult controls (n=441) speaking one of 24 languages, representing eleven Genera. The languages differ in terms of Concord, Lexical class (e.g. noun ‘la mayoría’ vs quantifier ‘most’), use of Partitive (‘of the’), the number of Syllables, and Quantifier-Noun Order, among others. The findings suggest a fundamentally uniform pattern of the acquisition of conceptual categories across languages, which is modulated by specific syntactic and lexical features. We discuss whether the similarities in acquisition are underlined by universal conceptual primitives.