The paper concerns psycholinguistic phenomena connected with meta-language, metalinguistic awareness and children's semantic skills. The main aim of empirical activities was to analyze psychological and linguistic conditionings of acquiring the meanings of words by 4- and 6-year-old children. It was examined how children understand the meaning of words from two categories: home and family. The analyses and conclusions on the creation of meaning presented in the paper are focused around the symbiosis of two planes: cognitive and linguistic. An analysis of the collected empirical material shows that their compilation reveals the unique nature of children's meta-language reflection, the character of concepts and notion profiles which are closely determined by mental processes.