A comparative investigation of semantic structure among adult native English speakers and speakers of English as a second language and the suggested course of semantic development among children support a hypothesis for semantic development in a second language.Second language learners are seen to conceptualize semantic relations in the domain of address terms with respect to salient perceptually‐based dimensions and less salient abstract dimensions relevant to their native cultural orientation rather than the orientation of the second language. Among children too, the progression from perceptual to abstract representation is suggested to occur as a function of the learner's growing knowledge and experience of the world. Since semantic development occurs as a continuing process through adulthood, especially for adult second language learners, second language semantic development is hypothesized to occur as a process of transition from native to second language semantic structures and a function of the changing cultural orientation of the learner. The transition is initially marked by the learners' salient reliance upon perceptually‐based dimensions and later by increasingly salient reliance upon abstract culturally relative dimensions in the second langu