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Children acquire a spoken language in a few years. Five-to-six-year-old English learners have vocabularies of 2,500 to 5,000 words, and add 5,000 words per year for the first several years of schooling. This exponential learning rate cannot be accounted for by the instruction they receive. Instead, children learn that the meaning of a new word can be inferred because it occurs in the same context as familiar words (e.g., ''lion'' is often seen with ''cowardly'' and ''king''). As British linguist [[John Rupert Firth]] says, "You shall know a word by the company it keeps".
The environment in which children live may also impact their ability to acquire reading skills. Children who are regularly exposed to chronic environmental noise pollution, such as highway traffic noise, have been known to show decreased ability to discriminate between [[phonemes]] (oral language sounds) as well as lower reading scores on standardized tests.<ref name="CohenGlass1973">{{cite journal|last1=Cohen|first1=Sheldon|last2=Glass|first2=David C.|last3=Singer|first3=Jerome E.|title=Apartment noise, auditory discrimination, and reading ability in children|journal=Journal of Experimental Social Psychology|volume=9 |issue=5|year=1973 |pages=407–422 |issn=0022-1031 |doi=10.1016/S0022-1031(73)80005-8}}</ref>▼
===Reading to children: necessary but not sufficient===
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So, "reading to children is not the same as teaching children to read". Nonetheless, reading to children is important because it socializes them to the activity of reading; it engages them; it expands their knowledge of spoke language; and it enriches their linguist ability by hearing new and novel words and grammatical structures. Reading and speech are codependent: a richer vocabulary facilitates skilled reading, and reading promotes vocabulary development. There is also some evidence that "shared reading" with children does help to improve reading if the children's attention is directed to the words on the page as they are being read to.<ref name="MyersBotting2008">{{cite journal |last1=Myers|first1=L. |last2=Botting|first2=N. |title=Literacy in the mainstream inner-city school: Its relationship to spoken language|journal=Child Language Teaching and Therapy|volume=24 |issue=1|year=2008 |pages=95–114|issn=0265-6590 |doi=10.1177/0265659007084570|s2cid=145153275 |url=http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/13719/3/Lucy%20RC%20paper%20revised%20CRO.pdf }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|title=Increasing Young Children's Contact With Print During Shared Reading: Longitudinal Effects on Literacy Achievement, 2012-04-17, 1467–8624.2012.01754.x|year=2012|doi=10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01754.x|pmid=22506889|last1=Piasta|first1=S. B.|last2=Justice|first2=L. M.|last3=McGinty|first3=A. S.|last4=Kaderavek|first4=J. N.|journal=Child Development|volume=83|issue=3|pages=810–20}}</ref>
▲The environment in which children live may also impact their ability to acquire reading skills. Children who are regularly exposed to chronic environmental noise pollution, such as highway traffic noise, have been known to show decreased ability to discriminate between [[phonemes]] (oral language sounds) as well as lower reading scores on standardized tests.<ref name="CohenGlass1973">{{cite journal|last1=Cohen|first1=Sheldon|last2=Glass|first2=David C.|last3=Singer|first3=Jerome E.|title=Apartment noise, auditory discrimination, and reading ability in children|journal=Journal of Experimental Social Psychology|volume=9 |issue=5|year=1973 |pages=407–422 |issn=0022-1031 |doi=10.1016/S0022-1031(73)80005-8}}</ref>
===Stages to skilled reading===
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