This paper argues that an important aspect of vocabulary development is readers' understanding of the nature of written language. The purpose of the study was to investigate the process involved in acquiring word knowledge from written context. Prereading kindergarten children were read two picture storybooks on three separate occasions (per book) and were then invited to take their turns to "read" the books. Using an ordinal category system developed for the study, three analyses of the three "readings" of each book were made which identified patterns of vocabulary growth. The results showed the ways that children learned lexicogrammatical information incidentally through exposure to written context.

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