Abstract
Understanding of time, its duration, and the manner of its passing is part of the abstract thinking. However, the communication needs require that the formal language devices used for expressing action in time be seized by children at their early age, that is in a period of thinking solely in concrete terms.
The presented text describes the findings of a research dealing with the children's grammatical preconcepts. In the perception of those messages whose central meaning is a piece of information about time, certain phenomena were observed: their existence explains the speech ontogenesis and thought development in early childhood.
It turns out that a child understands a message in a complex manner; a verbal form does not always seem to be decisive for a child - he/she prioritises the adverbial expressions which enable him/her to make sense of the abstract space of time dimensions. The adjacent time zones are then understood in intersection by the child.