To determine whether children possess representations and concepts of space before they acquire verbal descriptions of these, children's formation of symbolic representations of space and their acquisition of verbal referents for them were observed. It was found for subjects in the study that conceptual representations of space relations were acquired sequentially in the course of cognitive development, that age alone affected the acquisition of representations of space relations, both as placements (actions) and as language (prepositions) representing space, and that the children did have operational concepts of space relations before they were able to match these concepts with an appropriate preposition as a linguistic description. (Author/MF)