Put the Horse NEXT to the Lake and FAR from the Water Tower: Locative Understanding in Geographic Environments

Locatives, or spatial concepts, are phrases or words that denote place location and are essential for descriptions of locations in space. Despite their importance, how locatives are used and understood in large-scale geographical spaces has received little attention in the literature. Existing research on the cognitive development of locatives by English speakers has focused primarily on locative understanding in one spatial context, that of small-scale tabletop spaces. In addition, these studies have provided few data about the development of locative understanding beyond the age of about seven years. In this article we report the results of a portion of a multiyear study that examined the understanding of locatives in both a small-scale tabletop space and a large landscape model space. Participants of ages three, four, five, seven, and nineyears old and an adult control group responded to these instructions: “Put the [object] [using a locative term] the [in relation to a referent]” in either the tabletop model or the landscape model. The location and the context of object placement were recorded and analyzed. This article focuses on the results of object placement in the model town. Results show a developmental progression in all but two of the twenty locatives tested. In addition, results show that scale and context are important for locative understanding in geographic environments.