In the three studies here described we aimed at determining when children (form public and private schools), college students and adults (who had completed the 5th grade) begin to appropriately use terms that refer to space. The terms we investigated were ''on'' or ''on the top of'', ''in'' or ''inside of'', ''taking off'', ' 'taking out'', ''inside'' and ''outside''. The results from the children show that, for questions regarding the placement of objects, the production and appropriation of spatial terms increase with age. The type of school had no effect on these results. However, we found that age and type of school had influenced the results among children for questions related to other uses of spatial terms. Comparisons between the two adult groups showed an effect of schooling in question 2 of the second study only, with college students outperforming adults with a 5th grade education.
Spatial terms; language development; semantic domain
