ABSTRACT
Naturalistic and experimental studies of early word use have revealed that young children, like adults, use labels to refer to object kinds as opposed to analogical or spatiotemporal associations. E. V. Clark suggested that words are overextended because the child has only partial meanings, that is, has only abstracted a subset of the semantic features that make up the definition of the word. Most current models of word meaning acquisition hypothesize that the young word learner is capable of abstracting the objects' features, that is, adopt an analytic mode of processing. Partonomic knowledge, that is, knowing subdivision of objects into parts, may be very important for differentiating basic level categories. Each infant's percentage looking time to each picture was obtained by summing looking time to that picture and dividing it by the total time spent looking at both pictures.
