.3-5 Year-old Children's Spatial Dimensions The Word "big / Small" Cognitive Research

The study of children's spatial cognition includes two aspects—the development of children's spatial concept and the acquisition rules of children's spatial words. Spatial words consist with dimensional words and locality words. This paper is focus on the dimensional words"big/little". The research of dimensional words is always attracted many psychologist and linguist whom are domestic or overseas. So this paper has a rich date on the theme, and also uses a new method search for children's semantic cognitive rules and judge standard of the dimensional words"big/little". The paper includes two experiments, one of which measures 105 children's cognitive rules of the dimensional words"big/little".The children are from 3 years old to 5 years old; the second experiment measures 180 children's judge standard when they compare some objects. The children are also 3-5 years old.The results of this study are:1. Preschool children are following certain cognitive rules when they judge two dimensional things'big or little. Children are 3 years old they follow four kinds of rules: correct rule, height rule, salient-dimension rule and salient-dimensional- difference rule, most of them use height rule.2. Children are 4 years old they follow three kinds of rules: correct rule, height rule and salient-dimension rule in the"big"session, but in the"little"session also has salient-dimensional- difference rule. Most of them use correct rule during the"big/little"session, the percentage reaches more than 50%.3. Children are 5 years old they follow three kinds of rules: correct rule, height rule and salient-dimension rule in two session of experiment one, the percentage of uses correct rule reaches more than 75%. Three age groups aren't follow width rule.4. Children are 3 years old has reference normative standards when they judging objects, and their grade for the familiar single object better than for the unfamiliar single object. Children are 4 and 5years old they can reference correct standard for both of familiar and unfamiliar objects. 5. When the normative standards interferes with perceptual judgments, in every age group, children's number of reference perceptual standard is more than reference normative standard during the two experiment conditions, besides, the children are older and more of them reference perceptual standard for the familiar object, and with the age's increase, children whom produce normative form for the unfamiliar object.