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.

定位词或空间概念是表示地点位置的短语或单词，对于描述空间位置至关重要。尽管它们很重要，但如何在大型地理空间中使用和理解定位词在文献中却很少受到关注。现有的关于说英语的人对方位词认知发展的研究主要集中在一种空间背景下的方位理解，即小规模桌面空间。此外，这些研究几乎没有提供关于 7 岁以后位置理解发展的数据。在本文中，我们报告了一项多年研究的一部分结果，该研究检查了对小规模桌面空间和大型景观模型空间中定位词的理解。三岁、四岁、五岁、七岁的参与者，对象] [使用方位词] [相对于所指对象]”在桌面模型或景观模型中。记录和分析对象放置的位置和上下文。本文重点介绍模型城镇中物体放置的结果。结果显示，在测试的 20 个定位词中，除了两个之外，其他所有定位词都有发展进展。此外，结果表明，规模和背景对于地理环境中的定位理解很重要。