Sj. Henderson et al., EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND LITERACY SKILLS OF AN EXTREMELY PRECOCIOUS READER, The Gifted child quarterly, 37(2), 1993, pp. 78-83
Precocious literacy is a form of intellectual giftedness that occurs f
requently in young children. This case study documents the emergence o
f reading ability in an extremely precocious reader between the ages o
f 2 years 7 months and 3 years 2 months. At the end of this period, th
e child's word recognition ability was conservatively estimated at the
late first-grade level, and he was able to use knowledge of some leve
l of letter-sound correspondences to sound out unfamiliar words and ps
eudowords. However, his writing skills did not begin to develop to a c
omparable 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.