Learning to read with underdeveloped phonemic awareness but lexicalized phonological recoding: a case study of a 3-year-old

Case studies on very precocious readers are useful for examining what sourc es of knowledge and processes are necessary in the acquisition of reading. This is a case study of a 40-month-old child with a word reading age of 8 y ears 6 months. Tests indicated that she had no phoneme awareness beyond ini tial phonemes, and that her productive spelling was undeveloped. In reading she was highly proficient at rapid phonological recoding, both by correspo ndences that were contextually sensitive and those that were not. The forme r determined her high level of irregular pronunciations for irregular consi stent non-words. Experiments indicated that she had well-specified orthogra phic lexical representations. It was concluded that her phonological recodi ng was an implicit process based on sublexical relations induced from her l exical representations rather than explicitly taught letter-sound correspon dences. The implications of the results for major developmental models of r eading acquisition are examined. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.