This report presents a methodology for examining perceptual development in the arts and describes a study based on this methodology. The purpose of the study was to chart the developmental course of perceptual skills used in the arts and to investigate whether these skills generalize across art forms and aesthetic properties or whether they are specific to the art form and/or property to which they apply. The sensitivity of 7-, 9-, and 12-year-old children to the aesthetic properties of repleteness, expression, and composition was investigated in the art forms of drawing, music, and literature. The stylistic properties manipulated in sensitivity tasks were, in drawing, thickness and texture of line; in music, articulation, timbre, and dynamics; in literature, meter, rhyme, and similes. Sensitivity to aesthetic properties was shown to develop between 7 and 9 years of age. Ability to perceive aesthetic properties in one art form did not predict ability to perceive these same properties in another art form. Likewise, ability to perceive one aesthetic property did not predict ability to perceive another aesthetic property in the same art form. These results were seen to indicate that very young children do not attend to aesthetic properties of adult art and that aesthetic perception develops property by property and domain by domain. It was suggested that aesthetic perception appears to emerge as not one skill but as many. (Author/RH)