Developmental changes in the comprehension of near

Abstract

Children's understanding and use of proximity propositions have received less attention from developmental psycholinguists than have their acquisition of other relational terms. This paper takes note of the imprecise and relativistic meaning of the common preposition near, and shows that there are subtle but interesting developments in the comprehension of the term during the years 3 to 6. Earlier work has revealed that young children frequently respond to instructions with near by placing objects in contact with each other. The present paper considers whether the development from this strategy is dichotomous (contact vs. non‐contact) or gradualistic (with non‐contact responses gradually increasing in distance as the child grows older). An experimental test with 47 3‐6 year olds confirms that contact responses decrease in frequency with age, and significant between‐group differences in mean distance of placements are taken as supporting a modified gradualistic account of the developments. These findings are discussed in relation to independent work on the development of spatial cognition and the spatial lexicon. It is argued that the results reflect an interaction of linguistic and other cognitive developments, but do not support theories which maintain that language is acquired by mapping onto prior conceptual domains.