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Previous studies have shown that young children selectively attend to some object properties and ignore others when generalizing a newly learned object name. Moreover, the specific properties children attend to depend on the stimulus and task context. The present study tested an attentional account: that children's feature selection in name generalization is guided by non-strategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information presented in the task. Four experiments presented 3-year-old children and adults with novel artifacts consisting of distinctive base objects with appended parts. In a Name condition, subjects were asked whether test objects had the same name as the exemplar. In a Similarity condition, subjects made similarity judgments for the same objects. Subjects in two experiments were shown a function for either the base object or the parts. Both adults' naming and …