The Development of Place Categorization in Children

Shelley Pazer
The Discovery Group, Inc.
New York, NY

Citation: Pazer, Shelley (1992). "The Development of Place Categorization in Children ." Children's Environments 9 (1): 20-41. Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/

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Abstract

This paper is designed to introduce a new area of research concerning children and the environment: how children categorize and give meaning to places and how the language of place develops in children throughout the pre-adolescent years. In pursuit of this goal, the major contributing theories from a variety of fields are discussed with special attention given to the conceptual orientations and methodological frameworks of "contextual" approaches to category development. This paper also describes the author's study of the development of place categorization in children in a manner analogous to the construction of taxonomies of concrete objects, following Tversky and Hemenway's (1983) work with adults. Children described in the present research produced a taxonomy of places similar to an adult taxonomy in structure but different in content. The paper concludes with a call for further research in this relatively unexplored area of children's relationship with the environment.

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