Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., "baby"…

We examined the effects of object attributes on children's descriptive patterns in a referential communication task. Thirty preschoolers described object pairs that were selected by the experimenter. The targets were defined by shared size or colour, and differed on the non-target dimension in half of the trials. The children also completed a…