![]() On this view, the possession of vocabulary knowledge for a word is not an all or nothing factor, governed by whether or not a child knows something akin to the dictionary definition of a word. A word contributes to the meaning of a sentence but at the same time, the meaning of the word is in part a product of the sentence and context in which it appears. Words and the contexts in which they appear have a close interdependency. For words to drive comprehension however, we need to consider more than whether knowledge of a particular word is there or not. This is seen most obviously when a child has an impoverished vocabulary: not knowing the meaning of a particular word has clear and detrimental implications for comprehending language which contains that word. Words are a crucial component of comprehension, and therefore it is not surprising to find that children who struggle with language during development often have difficulty dealing with words. Word knowledge develops early in infancy and before long, children are able to produce and comprehend many thousands of words, using their vocabulary knowledge flexibly and creatively to communicate with others. They provide a link between a phonological (or orthographic) form and a referent, resulting in a unit of meaning that can be understood and shared between people. Words are the building blocks of language.
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