EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND LITERACY SKILLS OF AN EXTREMELY PRECOCIOUS READER

Precocious literacy is a form of intellectual giftedness that occurs frequently in young children. This case study documents the emergence of reading ability in an extremely precocious reader between the ages of 2 years 7 months and 3 years 2 months. At the end of this period, the child's word recognition ability was conservatively estimated at the late first-grade level, and he was able to use knowledge of some level of letter-sound correspondences to sound out unfamiliar words and pseudowords. However, his writing skills did not begin to develop to a comparable degree until after he was 4 years old. The results are used to generate hypotheses about the nature and measurement of precocious reading and its relations with oral language and writing skills.