It has been suggested that word learning follows two broad phases. First. a general idea of the word meaning is formed. This is often sufficient for getting ‘the gist’ of spoken and written texts. In the second phase, after multiple exposures to the word in multiple contexts, a word is known at a ‘deep’ level, and can be used in different contexts and may be defined in several ways. It takes a long time and multiple contacts with a word for the second phase to be attained. However, as noted above, it is not always necessary to know the meaning of a word at a ‘deep’ level, and in early childhood contexts not very many words will be known at this level