Dziecięce konceptualizacje „tęsknoty”

The paper seeks to shows the conceptualizations of the concept of longing/yearningas understood by children at different stages of cognitive development; intellectually normalsix-year-old children and ten-year-old children with Down syndrome. The way of expressingthe emotion of longing depends on the cognitive abilities of the studied children. What emergesfrom them is subjective experience, individual viewpoints and the popular view of the world. Inboth groups of subjects we see differences in the construction (choice of aspects) of the semanticstructure of the concept, dissimilarities in the anthropocentric attitude towards reality andthe subjectivism of observations.