Children with a mean age of 2;10 were presented with three tasks designed to evaluate their concept of front-back orientation. Two of the tasks were non-linguistic (a parade task and a canonical encounter task, involving nine toy objects). A third linguistic task assessed the child's knowledge of "front" and "back" by asking him/her to point to the fronts and backs of the toys. The main result was a disconfirmation of the hypothesis that a concept of front-back orientation may be dependent on lexical knowledge of "front" and/or "back." Children with all levels of lexical knowledge performed equally well on the non-linguistic tasks. In addition, no evidence was found that the words "front" and "back" are comprehended for some toy objects before others. The ability to make consistent object placements in the non-linguistic tasks is interpreted as evidence for a complex disjunctive concept of front-back. (JB)