Across languages, children produce locative "back" earlier and more frequently than "front," but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a "semantic misanalysis" explanation, early meanings for "front" and "back" are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, "pragmatic inference" explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of "front" and "back;" the profile of "back" can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared with visibility. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of "front/back" by 3- and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used "back" more frequently than "front" in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the "front/back" asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults' production of spatial language cross-linguistically.