TEACH YOUR BABY TO READ

The Right Time Reader Method is -
easy and natural,
better than waiting for school,
the next step in homeschooling.

Home

Who Is Talking?

Discovery?

How does it work?

How can I use it?

To download

Before you start

Tough irregularities

Why a Patent?

Is RTR an invention?

Just an experiment?

Plans and Hopes

Shareware Agreement

Final Words

References

Early Reading: Theory and practice –
learning from the youngest readers

Introduction

The teaching and learning of reading, as well as the actual mechanisms employed by normal readers, remain the subject of intense interest in many quarters, from academic research to the marketplace, and have even entered the current Presidential election campaign in the United States. The Republican nominee (George Bush) has attempted to establish himself as "the education candidate" and has promised to emphasise the use of phonics instruction in reading. At local levels in the US, debate rages about the best teaching/learning techniques, with many millions of dollars at stake for those who produce and deliver reading education. Even more is at stake for those whose futures will be determined by their reading skill, or lack of it.


In the academic world, debate about the mechanisms of reading and how reading ability is acquired is also intense (Cassidy & Wenrich, 1998). Here, by far the most attention appears to be focused on the functioning of normally-skilled readers, the specific subskills and mechanisms of reading, such as phonemic awareness and short-term memory, how these skills and mechanisms might best be acquired or improved, and how this knowledge might be applied to the problems of school-age children who have difficulty reading at the skill level of their age group. A search of the literature reveals that no consensus has emerged about the structure and relationships of the mental mechanisms that underlie the ability to read.


Furthermore, a scan of library shelves for relevant book titles, and a search of PsycLit for research studies, shows that relatively little work has been done to explore events at the lower age boundary of reading acquisition. It seems likely that we could gain important insights about reading and its acquisition from the very youngest readers; from those who have learned the skill without the intervention of formal training, and at a far earlier age than formal training is usually thought appropriate. It is this group, what is known about them, and the implications for the teaching of reading, that I find most interesting, and which can throw significant light on the reading debates, as I hope to demonstrate.

Definition difficulties: Early, Precocious

The idea behind this essay is hardly original. Our library even has a book by Rhona Stainthorp and Diana Hughes with a similar title: Learning from children who read at an early age (Stainthorp & Hughes, 1999). However, the earliness of the studies reported in the book is seldom earlier than the beginning of school, by which time the earliest readers have already achieved significant levels of proficiency without formal schooling. If the goal is to learn from early readers, Stainthorp may have come late to the lesson. She writes of identifying already-reading entrants to "infant school", but such schools in the UK typically admit ages 5-7 years, comparable to kindergarten through grade 2 in the US. Although the usage is approximate, in the US the word "infant" is generally applied to neonates in the relatively helpless pre-walking ages. I suspect that we will miss important phenomena unless we study the processes (not only the family backgrounds) that produced the children who arrive at school already reading.


There is no standard usage for words such as "early reader", "precocious" or "gifted". Early tends to mean that reading skills were acquired prior to school entry, a period that is long in terms of years, even longer in terms of developmental change, and can fairly be called an entire lifetime. Thus the term lacks precision. Precocious is used in two separate, if often overlapping, ways: early, and superior to age matched controls. Gifted has often been defined as having an IQ above 135, but this definition has been broadened to include abilities beyond those measured by standard IQ tests. That there is a high correlation between giftedness and high reading ability is unsurprising, as reading skills play such a large role in the usual IQ test.


In any case, the group of exceptionally early readers is small, identified as 1-2% of the population by Fletcher-Flinn (Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson, 2000), and found to constitute 1.64% of 1405 kindergarten entrants surveyed by Grant (Grant & Brown, 1986). Grant used the term "precocious reader", but also referred to those children entering kindergarten already able to read as "early readers".


Stroebel, et al, examined 21 "early readers" who were aged "4 yrs 2 mo to 6 yrs 5 mo" (Stroebel & Evans, 1988), while Mills et al dealt with "precocious readers" who were first tested at 5-6 years of age (Mills & Jackson, 1990). Huttenlocher investigated an autism-related pathology (hyperlexia) characterised by "precocious and compulsive" reading at ages 4-6 years (Huttenlocher & Huttenlocher, 1973). Fisch, reviewing several studies of the environmental correlates of "early literacy" in children at age 7, could only lump together all parental influences in the preschool years (Fisch, Smith, & Phinney, 1997). Patel examined aspects of 20 "precocious" readers aged 5 yrs 1 month to 6 yrs 5 months, who had been identified as readers prior to kindergarten entry (Patel & Patterson, 1982). Jackson compared the skills of 97 kindergarten-age precocious readers (mean comprehension at 3rd-grade level) with those of normal readers in the second and third grades (Jackson & Biemiller, 1985). In another study, Jackson investigated the reading subskills and mental structures that underlay precocious reading ability in a group of 87 post-kindergarten children with reading skills ranging from second to fifth grade level .(Jackson, Donaldson, & Cleland, 1988)


There appears to be no move to simplify or standardise the terminology. As recently as 1998, Stainthorp referred to precocious readers while actually dealing with none younger than age 5 (Stainthorp & Hughes, 1998).


The term early reading or early reader are also used simply to designate the earlier years of conventional reading acquisition in school. Cunningham uses the term in this sense in a 10-year follow-up study of children who were first tested in grade one (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997)


Relatively few studies, such as that by Schnur, who investigated 24 precocious readers aged 3 yrs 5 mo-6 yrs, reach into the preschool years (Schnur & Lowrey, 1986). Thus it appears that most studies of early or precocious readers are undertaken only when the children are identified and first conveniently gathered in a kindergarten setting. While this is understandable as a simple matter of logistics, it also indicates the likely existence of severe limitations in the data. Few studies examine the years during which precocious reading acquisition occurred, and in data gathered later there is the possibility of contamination by kindergarten experiences.


I suggest that this emphasis on school-age children, together with a tendency by school-oriented researchers to regard pre-school years as a single block of time, may create a distorted view. While the rapidity of development during these years, and the potentially lasting effects that early influences can produce are well known, it is still easy to give insufficient weight to these facts when a dichotomous characterisation of reader versus non-reader is imposed on school entrants.

I believe that investigators would do well to emphasise the fact that (for instance) a single year such as that which separates grade one from grade two, and which is less than one fifth of the lifespan of the young scholar, is one half of the lifetime of the most precocious infants, who are first learning to read even as they master speech. The significance of any time interval becomes relatively far greater as we consider the earliest years, simply because it is a larger percentage of the infant lifespan. Furthermore, it is well to remain mindful of the existence of critical periods for special types of learning and development. While these facts are not controversial, they may be too-seldom stressed by those who focus mainly on school-age children, and call them precocious or early readers.


In contrast to the list of studies of school-age children above (which could have been longer), relatively few have focused on the development of reading as it happened naturally. Catherine Crain-Thoreson and Philip Dale followed the development of 25 infants who had been identified as verbally precocious, testing their language and literacy skills at intervals from age 1.8 years to 6.6 years , giving a picture of progressive development (Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992);(Dale, Crain-Thoreson, & Robinson, 1995). Dale is also a key figure in the development of instruments to measure infant verbal abilities and a publicly available database of the results (the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, at http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/cdi/).


Henderson et al present a case study of "the emergence of reading ability in an extremely precocious reader between the ages of 2 years 7 months and 3 years 2 months", by which time they estimated the child's word recognition ability as first grade level or better: comparable to children seven years old who had the benefit of two years of formal school. Claire Fletcher-Flinn has been studying a "precocious" reader from age 21 months, at which time "Maxine" had a reading age of over 8 years (Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson, 2000). In both of these cases, the age of reading onset was approximately half that at which other researchers are discovering "early" reading.


The components of reading

Researchers have identified a number of key concepts and skills that comprise the components of reading ability in normal readers. Before examining the earliest appearances of this mechanism, we need to put a frame on its diagram and label the pieces. The following is a rather short and incomplete list of those widely regarded as fundamental or significant. Many other terms have been introduced to denote subtle variations and various combinations of these constructs. Even in this list, some overlap will be apparent.

Purpose of print: knowledge that words convey a message, just as pictures and oral language do.


Alphabetic principle: the understanding that letters represent sounds and that whole words contain patterns of groups of sounds


Letter naming: the ability to assign the conventional name to the printed letters of the alphabet.


Grapheme: written symbols, or letters of the alphabet, which are arbitrary, and usually non-pictorial; the written representation of phonemes.


Phoneme: individual sound, the smallest unit of sound.


Letter-sound correspondences: the knowledge that each letter corresponds to one or more sounds in the spoken language.


Segmentation: the ability to divide words into segments corresponding to their component phonemes.


Phonological awareness: the conscious ability to detect and deliberately manipulate the sounds that comprise spoken words, so that they can be rearranged, recombined, or deleted.


Coding: translating information from one form to another, usually from auditory to written form.


Decoding: translating individual letters and/or groups of letters into sounds to access the pronunciation of a word.


Grapheme-to-phoneme mapping: knowledge of the correspondence between printed symbols, including groups of symbols, and the sounds they represent.


Onset, rime: a sometimes useful way to divide words into units that are not syllables. Onset is the first part of a single phoneme or consonant cluster (e.g., /b/ in bought), rime is the remainder, which may have multiple phonemes (e.g., /ought/ in bought).


Vocabulary acquisition: the building of a knowledge base of words and their meanings.


Metacognition: the ability to think about thinking, to recognise that one's own thoughts are subject to examination and description.


Retrieval: transfer of information to short-term from long-term memory.


Lexical access: access to a mental dictionary.



These terms are used to describe and distinguish the subskills involved in reading, and to identify the putative mental mechanisms that underlie those subskills. How those mechanisms operate, how they relate to each other, and where in the brain they may be located, remains controversial.


Two views sometimes seen as polar opposites are the modular and the parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. Simply put, in the former, coding, decoding, and interpretation tasks are carried out by particular brain modules, each of which passes its output along as input for the next processing module, with the final module producing speech, understanding, or the pressing of a button, as appropriate to the task. In PDP models, several neural systems (usually thought to be neural networks that can be modelled in a computer) operate simultaneously, presenting their current state to consciousness when some threshold of classification success is reached.


Most research groups appear to favour some hybrid of these mechanisms, but each has its own view of the necessary component mechanisms and their connectivity. The diagrammed examples that follow are largely self-explanatory:




Figure 1.

This diagram of sequential processing is largely modular, but includes some feedback and loops. It is based on a review by Ellis, which was intended to take into account the features of several models that were popular at the time. (Chapter 3 in(Ellis, 1993).


According to this model, an accomplished reader may not need to rely on the semantic system to produce speech. That the semantic system may be bypassed entirely is attested by a story told of a US politician who, when delivering a speech handed to him by his speechwriter, read "WWII" as "double-you, double-you, eye, eye" when addressing a group of veterans on Veteran's Day. (I once saw a film of this, which I estimate to have happened in the 1950s or 1960s, but I can't find a reference)






Figure 2

In contrast, Figure 2 shows overlapping functions that can be carried out simultaneously by neural networks that remain in contact with the central recognition function rather than completing their processing before producing an output (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). Although these authors do not use the term, this reviewer cannot distinguish between this scheme and those known as parallel distributed processing (PDP).


Figure 3 shows a dual-route structure with feedback is envisioned by Coltheart et al, who envision a computer model of the reading-aloud process:



Figure 3

Occupying a midway point between serial modular processing and the simultaneous overlapping processing of Grainger et al, Coltheart et al. suggest a dual-route system with a great deal of feedback between the processors (Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993).



Ehri discusses the stages of reading acquisition in a way that can be understood as the progressive construction and activation of a structure similar to these models, pointing out the different paths and processes that predominate at different points in the progression from beginning reader to accomplished reader (Ehri, 1994).

In her view, a beginning reader first uses "visual cue reading" in which entire words, perhaps together with extraneous details such as typeface and smudges on the page, are memorised as logographic units. Gradual appreciation of letter identities and sounds then permits phonemic segmentation and a transition to an "alphabetic phase" characterised by some phonemic awareness. Finally, the reader enters the orthographic phase when she consolidates grapheme-phoneme mapping with an internal lexicon.

Where some earlier writers considered this progression to be a shift from one stage to a next, with each stage being abandoned when the next is enabled, Ehri stresses that "phases" is a better description than stages, since the shift from one processing pattern to the next is a gradual shift in dominance rather than an abrupt cessation of one processing procedure in favour of another.


These contrasting explanatory systems are presented not as a starting point for an in-depth discussion of their subtleties, which would be a book-length project, nor to compare their relative merits, nor to criticise them in a negative way, but to illustrate the variety of conceptualisations among researchers investigating the mechanisms of reading, and to provide a framework for discussing the subject of reading ability and its acquisition. That the field has not matured to the point of having a single model emerge as the consensus view is a sign of how much remains to be learned, which is one of the points I wish to highlight in this essay.


Interestingly, my impression is that the research literature reflects the existence of several groups of researchers in this area who cite and respond chiefly to others within their own group while largely ignoring the findings, terminology and models of other groups. Adherents of several schools of thought, including cognitive, developmental, and connectionist, among others, each seem to work independently of the others. A diagram of these relationships, with publications joined by lines to the publications they refer to, would be interesting and instructive, showing strong groupings and relatively few connections where some important studies are cited by more than one group. However, that project will have to wait for another time.


The "gifted" early reader

Researchers have studied the reading background and reading processes of gifted children, and the main similarity among children in this group is that they were exposed to the written word in the home. However, this hardly distinguishes them from most other children of educated parents. Investigation of their abilities in the subtasks or mechanisms that are often used to describe the act of reading has given a confusing picture. It seems that gifted readers may emphasise or be skilled in some or all of the processes that reading is said to require -- or they may not. In particular, it is instructive to examine the case of "Maxine", who is an early or precocious reader by any definition, and who appears to lack phonological awareness, which is said by some researchers to be a key to reading (Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson, 2000).


"Maxine", a detailed case study

According to her parents, "Maxine" said her first words at age 8 months and was putting word pairs together by age 17 months. She showed an early interest in picture books, and letters and numbers that she pointed out were identified for her. She could name letters, and numerals up to 10 by age 19 months, and was taught some simple letter sounds by age 21 months, with 3-4 weeks' of ad lib exposure to the sound sheets in The Phonics Handbook, amounting to15-30 minutes of instruction per day. No independent reading was noted by her parents at that time, and they discontinued the programme.


Formal investigation began when Maxine was 21 months old. Soon she was seen to read short words such as mum, dad and hi when they were constructed with magnetic letters, and by 23 months she could identify such words in print. Two months later, her parents began to read to her from the Ready to Read books, pointing to words as they were read, but they stopped when she showed no interest.


Maxine's chief desire appeared to be for story books to be read to her. However, at 28 months she began to read fluently from those and other books. [Aside: It is difficult for me to read and report this account without recalling my own experiences at that age. I vividly recall the pleasure of being held on my mother's lap while she read stories to me. Like Maxine's parents, she sometimes pointed to words as she read, and I quickly saw that the marks at the bottom of the page were where the story came from. Like Maxine, I wasn't very interested in that distraction. Some words were easily remembered, but at first I had no particular urge to master the entire process myself. The parental company and involvement were the big attraction, with the story just a good focus for the event. It was not until a certain amount of negotiation occurred that I accepted that I could never have that attention in the quantity I wanted, and that the best I could do was develop the ability to get the stories for myself, which also received parental approbation. Then I worked at paying attention to the words, and I recall going through stages of success with simple words, followed by minor frustration as polysyllabic words were encountered, and frank irritation with irregular spellings, which seemed an unfair blow, just when I thought I had things figured out!]


Although Maxine was soon a fluent and independent reader, the researchers report that "at 33 months her spelling was virtually non-existent", which is in direct contrast to Ehri's contention that reading and spelling are 'two sides of the same coin', to such an extent that some dyslexia can be explained by a failure to learn spelling (Ehri, 1989; Ehri, 2000). Henderson et al. describe another reader who became proficient before age three, but who did not begin to develop writing skill until age four, again disconfirming a link between the receptive and productive use of written language (Henderson, Jackson, & Mukamal, 1993).


Furthermore, up to 40 months of age, Maxine repeatedly failed tests of phonological awareness. She could distinguish syllables in aurally presented words, but could neither produce or recognise their phonemic components. This puts a new perspective on studies that have found phonological awareness highly correlated with reading skill, and is consistent with the finding of Jackson et al. that among younger readers there is a more varied pattern of development of the subskills of reading than among normal second graders (Jackson, Donaldson, & Mills, 1993). A recent meta-analysis of such studies by Bus et al. indicates that phonological awareness is "important" for early reading skill, but not sufficient, with experimentally manipulated PA accounting for just 12% of the variation in word recognition ability (Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999).


Despite Maxine's inability to respond to phonological tests, she routinely produced reading that indicated a phonemic capability, if not awareness. Her inability to intentionally produce such responses may relate to the fact that her learning had not included any explicit sounding-out procedures, so that she had never practised such activities consciously.


Following Coltheart and Leahy, Maxine was given a series of tests that appeared to establish that she made much use of context-sensitive induced sublexical relations (ISRs), or a database of grapheme-phoneme correspondences formed from observations of the correspondences between printed and spoken language (Coltheart & Leahy, 1992).

Her rapid and 100% accurate responses to 2 sets of 20 words (regular consistent and irregular consistent), dropping to 85% (similar to reading-age matched controls) for ambiguous regular words, indicated that she was relying on unconscious retrieval from a significant database of context-sensitive ISRs rather than consciously applying rules (which are slow to deploy and may not be helpful) or finding analogies (which would also be slow, and would mislead in the irregular cases).


So we see that proficient reading is quite possible without any conscious awareness of phonology, and without some concomitants such as spelling that are often thought essential. The necessary ISRs can be acquired unconsciously through experience, allowing the database of familiar words to be built with little conscious effort, and the process of reading can then occur in an unconscious/automatic fashion similar to what (I suppose) we all do as adults. The process is so automatic that one wonders whether is it possible for an adult reader to *not* get the meaning of a familiar word – to see it without reading it.


Practical procedures

It appears that the state of theoretical understanding of reading and the reading acquisition process may not yet permit the rational design of targeted strategies to focus on specific components of reading as a way to improve early reading instruction. However, it is also clear that many children are capable of learning to read, or at least gaining a valuable foundation on which to base reading, years before they are normally sent to school.

Is it possible to use this knowledge even before a firm understanding of the mechanisms is in place? Studies too numerous to mention, spread over the past century, together with one theoretical approach, suggest that it is. A pair of the most recent of these studies illustrate the point:


Berninger

In what was intended to be a test of the connectionist model, Berninger et al. studied 48 children (mean age 89 months) who had been identified by their first grade teachers as "struggling" with reading, with a mean WISC-3 IQ of 92, and who scored from ½ to two standard deviations below the mean on several measures of reading-related skills (Berninger et al., 1999).

Children were randomised to three groups that met weekly for eight weeks, receiving flash-card-based tutorials that focused on whole words and their spelling, sub-words and their sounds, or combined whole- and sub-word study, with the emphasis on exposure to examples and an absence of explicit rules. Their purpose was to determine whether such exposure could, as a connectionist model asserts, improve the children's reading abilities, and which strategy might work best.


All methods produced significant improvements, simply by exposing the children to tutor modelling and guidance of pronunciation, without the presentation of any phonics rules. "The various treatments were equally effective in increasing level of reading achievement for taught words and for untrained real words and pseudowords", say the researchers, who conclude that even children who are "struggling" in an ordinary classroom setting can learn with a connectionist approach. Expressed differently, the experience of being exposed to correct mappings between print and sound in a one-on-one tutorial setting caused the children to build or improve their own mental databases or neural networks, which for one third of the children included improving their understanding of the alphabet principle, and this exposure was more effective and efficient than conventional rule-based instruction in a classroom group setting.


Hill

A similar result, couched in an entirely different theoretical and operational framework, was reported by researchers who compared very young children whose parents were enrolled in a literacy-activity intervention program with those who were not.

In this US study, parents in 205 multicultural families with children aged from 5 to 11 months were randomised to receive intervention (n = 105) or serve as controls (n = 99) (High, LaGasse, Becker, Ahlgren, & Gardner, 2000). Intervention, delivered by caregivers as part of pediatric care in a well-baby program, comprised the provision to the parents of educationally appropriate printed materials for the children, and instruction in their use at several healthcare visits (mean 3.4). Children in the older intervention group (18-25 months old; n = 88), but not in the younger (13-17 months old; n = 62), showed a significant increase in their receptive and expressive vocabulary, as measured by a modified version of the MacArthur Communication and Development Inventory, compared with controls.


Importantly, multivariate analysis showed that the positive effect of intervention on several literacy-related variables was explained by the time spent by parents reading aloud to children. When parent education, foreign birth and language proficiency, child age, and time spent reading together, were statistically factored out, no intervention advantage remained. Once again, time spent with caring adults who encourage involvement with reading produced positive effects on literacy-related skills, although the procedures in the Hill study were quite different from those in the Berninger study, and the children have not been followed up to the achievement of independent reading.


Discussion and conclusion

It is clear that a number of useful constructs have been created to dissect the act of reading into a set of subskills, and that the acquisition of reading ability must include the mastery of at least some of these. However, at least one of these subskills, phonemic awareness, has been shown to be non-essential. Furthermore, the order of acquisition of the subskills, and the ways in which they interact during the reading process, are not well established.

What has been established, although it appears not to have been the direct aim of any experimental program, is that young children learn best when interacting directly with a person who provides a model to be emulated. This would be expected by evolutionary psychologists, although I discovered no reading studies explicitly based on this theoretical foundation. Instead, the statement is heard repeatedly that reading is difficult because it is such a recent development in our evolutionary history (personal communication from M. Corballis, also (Pinker, 1994; Prior, 1989)), so that we have no evolved natural mechanisms or mental modules adapted for it. Gough & Hillinger stress this by calling reading "an unnatural act" (Gough & Hillinger, 1980).


However, for a child to learn by emulating more competent role models, beginning with parents, could hardly be more natural. Our ability to emulate, to mimic 'good tricks', may in fact be our greatest special talent as a species, with the advantages of mimicry perhaps being responsible for the further evolution of our hominid ancestors' already large brains (Blackmore, 1999).

The representative studies cited above, despite their different methods and their origins in different theoretical frameworks, confirm my own childhood experience, Maxine's, and numerous reports that link family literacy practices with children's early reading.


In the matter of the "reading wars", it should be clear to any impartial reader of the literature that both whole-language and phonics-type instruction have great merit, as well as great shortcomings. Whole language, as practised in New Zealand schools, makes good use of a child's natural tendency to emulate. Phonics-oriented instruction has been shown to improve reading ability, at least for a subset of children. However, to the extent that it requires the intervention of the conscious mind to memorise and apply abstract rules, it will remain difficult for all, and impossible for some, to benefit from it. Children learning to read should not have to bear the added burden of memorising, and learning to apply, abstract rules stored as declarative memories. Both whole-language techniques, and approaches such as phonics that are based on important subskills of reading, should be used in a balanced manner, with the phonics component of instruction presented in an emulation-based, rather than rule-based manner.


Furthermore, I suggest that future studies of reading and its development should take special care to use the mechanism of mimicry and to de-emphasise the application of conscious intellect that is required by rule-based learning. As a minimum precaution against what could be an important confounder, the potential amount of learning-by-mimicry should be equal across experimental groups.

1. Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Zook, D., Ogier, S., Lemos-Britton, Z., & Brooksher, R. (1999). Early Intervention for Reading Disabilities: Teaching the Alphabet Principle in a Connectionist Framework. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 32(6), 491.
   
2. Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   
3. A. G., & van Ijzendoorn, M. H. (1999). Phonological awareness and early reading: a meta-analysis of experimental training studies. Journal of Educational Psychology, Sept 1999 v91 i3 p403(1)., 91(3), 403(1).
   
4. Cassidy, J., & Wenrich, J. K. (1998). Literacy research and practice: what's hot, what's not and why. The Reading Teacher, 52(4), 402(5).
   
5. Coltheart, M., Curtis, B., Atkins, P., & Haller, M. (1993). Models of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-processing approaches. Psychological Review, 100(4), 589-608.
   
6. Coltheart, V., & Leahy, J. (1992). Children's and adults' reading of nonwords: Effects of regularity and consistency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, memory and cognition, 18, 718-729.
   
7. Crain-Thoreson, C., & Dale, P. S. (1992). Do early talkers become early readers? Linguistic precocity, preschool language, and emergent literacy. Developmental Psychology, 28(3), 421(9).
   
8. Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 934(12).
   
9. P. S., Crain-Thoreson, C., & Robinson, N. M. (1995). Linguistic precocity and the development of reading: The role of extralinguistic factors. Applied Psycholinguistics, 16(2), 173-187.
   
10. L. C. (1989). The development of spelling knowledge and its role in reading acquisition and reading disability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 22(6), 356-365.
    
11. L. C. (1994). Development of the ability to read words: Update. In R. B. E. Ruddell, Martha Rapp (Ed), 1275 pp., Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed., Vol. xvi, pp. 323-358). Newark, DE, USA: International Reading Association.
    
12. L. C. (2000). Learning to read and learning to spell: Two sides of a coin. Topics in Language Disorders, 20(3), 19-36.
    
13. Ellis, A. W. (1993). Reading, Writing, and Dyslexia. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum.
    
14. Fisch, R. O., Smith, M., & Phinney, M. Y. (1997). Project Read - the importance of early learning; Rx: read to your child. American Family Physician, 56(9), 2195(3).
    
15. Fletcher-Flinn, C. M., & Thompson, G. B. (2000). Learning to read with underdeveloped phonemic awareness but lexicalized phonological recoding: A case study of a 3-year-old. Cognition, 74(2), 177-208.
    
16. Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: an unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179-195.
    
17. Grainger, J., & Jacobs, A. M. (1996). Orthographic Processing in Visual Word Recognition: A Multiple Read-Out Model. Psychological Review, 103(3), 518-565.
    
18. Grant, J., & Brown, C. (1986). Precocious readers: A comparative study of early reading and non early reading kindergarten entrants. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 32(3), 223-233.
    
19. Henderson, S. J., Jackson, N. E., & Mukamal, R. A. (1993). Early development of language and literacy skills of an extremely precocious reader. Gifted Child Quarterly. Vol 37(2), Spr 1993, 78-83., 37(2), 78-83.
    
20. P. C., LaGasse, L., Becker, S., Ahlgren, I., & Gardner, A. (2000). Literacy Promotion in Primary Care Pediatrics: Can We Make a Difference? Pediatrics, 105(4), 927-.
    
21. Huttenlocher, P. R., & Huttenlocher, J. (1973). A study of children with hyperlexia. Neurology, 23(10), 1107-1116.
    
22. Jackson, N. E., & Biemiller, A. J. (1985). Letter, word, and text reading times of precocious and average readers. Child Development, 56(1), 196-206.
    
23. Jackson, N. E., Donaldson, G. W., & Cleland, L. N. (1988). The structure of precocious reading ability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(2), 234(10).
    
24. Jackson, N. E., Donaldson, G. W., & Mills, J. R. (1993). Components of reading skill in postkindergarten precocious readers and level-matched second graders. Journal of Reading Behavior, 25(2), 181-208.
    
25. Mills, J. R., & Jackson, N. E. (1990). Predictive significance of early giftedness: the case of precocious reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(3), 410(10).
    
26. Patel, P. G., & Patterson, P. (1982). Precocious reading acquisition: Psycholinguistic development, IQ, and home background. First Language, 3(8, Pt 2), 139-153.
    
27. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. London: Penguin Books.
    
28. Prior, M. R. (1989). Reading Disability: "Normative or Pathological". Australian Journal of Psychology, 41(2), 135-158.
    
29. Schnur, J. O., & Lowrey, M. A. (1986). Some characteristics of precocious readers. Early Child Development & Care, 26(3-4), 191-198.
    
30. Stainthorp, R., & Hughes, D. (1998). Phonological sensitivity and reading: Evidence from precocious readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 21(1), 53-68.
    
31. Stainthorp, R., & Hughes, D. (1999). Learning from children who read at an early age. London ; New York: Routledge.
    
32. Stroebel, S. S., & Evans, J. R. (1988). Neuropsychological and environmental characteristics of early readers. Journal of School Psychology. Vol 26(3), Fal 1988, 243-252., 26(3), 243-252.
    

The current URL is http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~parsonst/EarlyReadingEssay.html
This file was last modified 3-Nov-2001
To get in touch, email me: parsonst@ihug.co.nz .

=========================================