COMPONENTS OF READING SKILL IN POSTKINDERGARTEN PRECOCIOUS READERS AND LEVEL-MATCHED 2ND-GRADERS

Precocious readers are children who have made exceptionally rapid prog ress in beginning literacy. This study of precocious readers was desig ned to describe their skills in two ways: (a) by identifying any speci al strengths or weaknesses in precocious readers' component skills, re lative to the skills of older but less rapidly developing readers, and (b) by identifying the extent to which individual differences in the skill patterns of precocious readers are multidimensional. The cogniti ve, word-reading, and text-reading skills of 116 postkindergarten prec ocious readers were compared with those of 123 second graders, mostly above-average readers, who were matched with the precocious readers on reading comprehension level. The two groups were compared using multi ple-indicator modeling techniques. The same factor pattern accounted f or the performance of both groups on a set of 29 measures. Therefore, comparisons of factor mean levels and factor covariances were interpre table. No meaningful weaknesses were identified in the average skill p attern of postkindergarten precocious readers. Their strengths tended to mirror weaknesses often identified among disabled readers. Precocio us readers are especially rapid text readers, and they also are accura te identifiers of individual words, able to draw on strong phonologica l analysis skills as well as orthographic processes. However, covarian ces between orthographic and phonological word identification and betw een oral text-reading accuracy and effectiveness were lower for precoc ious than for second-grade readers, suggesting a diversity of skill pa tterns among highly able beginning readers.