For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, they need only have represented enough about the meanings of the words used by another speaker to understand what is intended in context on a particular occasion. Reliance on partial meanings is common in both children and adults. More detailed, shared, representations of word meanings for a domain depend on acquiring additional knowledge about that domain and its contents.

对于儿童和成人来说，有效地相互交流取决于对特定实体、动作或关系有足够的了解，以理解和产生所使用的词语。说话者利用与对话者共享的传统含义，但他们是否共享单词含义的每一个细节？它们不需要对它们使用的所有术语的含义具有相同或完全指定的表示。相反，他们只需要代表足够关于另一位说话者在特定场合用于理解上下文意图的词语的含义。对部分意义的依赖在儿童和成人中都很常见。一个域的更详细、共享的词义表示取决于获得关于该域及其内容的额外知识。