One child in one hundred learns to read at home around the age of four. These children are an interesting population, particularly in relation to the different components of their psycholinguistic development and home background.
Twenty such children from Ottawa, Canada were administered Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, CIRCUS (a general language develop ment test), tests related to metalinguistic processing and WISC. Some relevant home background data were also collected.
Results show that precocious reading acquisition in these preschoolers cannot be attributed to either intelligence or general language develop ment. Interestingly, these children who read fluently like older children performed badly on metalinguistic processing tasks. The total pattern of the findings on these children suggest that the poor scores on these tests could not be dismissed in terms of task difficulty.
An attempt is made to relate the above results to the current scientific scholarship on the possible psycholinguistic deficits associated with failure in reading acquisition, especially involving metalinguistic abilities.
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