Vocabulary development begins when a parent responds to the sounds a baby makes. A child responds immediately to the environment around him/her, and the parent responses contribute to the development of a child�s listening vocabulary. Children will imitate the language they hear, whether it is �baby talk� or regional dialect. From this beginning, a child begins to develop a rich vocabulary. Books and being read to are also part of a child�s developing vocabulary. Through listening to stories being read aloud, children begin to get a �sense of story.� They begin to hear words like characters, setting, problem, and dialogue, and add these terms to their ever-growing internal dictionary. So it is very natural that parents are their child�s first vocabulary teacher. The first words that children listen to are heard from their parents. As they learn to speak, parents respond. Parents continue by reading and then listening to children read. Some Statistics The Virginia Polytechnic Institute indicates that � By age 4 a person probably knows 5,600 words By age 5 a person probably knows 9,600 words By age 6 a person probably knows 14,700 words By age 7 a person probably knows 21,200 words By age 8 a person probably knows 26,300 words By age 9 a person probably knows 29,300 words By age 10 a person probably knows 34,300 words By age 20 a college sophomore probably knows 120,000 words The Importance of Vocabulary in the Reading Process According to the National Institute For Literacy, Partnership for Reading, vocabulary is an important part of both the decoding and the comprehension that is necessary for learning to read. At the earliest stages of literacy, children use the language they have heard and spoken to make sense out of the print they will read. Children read words they have heard and spoken, that are part of their oral vocabulary, more easily than words they are not familiar with. As reading difficulty increases, children need to know the meaning of most of the words they read. Children need to know the meanings of new words they have not heard before. Other research studies have concluded: Children who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge continue to encounter a gap in vocabulary as they continue in school. The number of words children learn varies between 2 and 8 words per day and 750 to 3,000 words a year. A great deal of vocabulary can be learned from just reading. Even �children who read just ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than children who do little reading.� (Nagy & Anderson)