Baby Can Read!

1. Allison Slater
   March 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am

   I thought my kid was doing well because he's three and he reads, but this is crazy!

2. Sid Morrison
   March 6th, 2008 at 9:20 am

   Wow. The video that accompanies the article is a whole lot better than the article itself because it shows the TV News reportrix and her cameraman having the kid read random words they choose from magazines (not words the parent picks). That was pretty impressive! I do wish that they took it one step further by seeing if she could describe (or find) a "banana" or draw/describe a "beetle". And what about abstract non-tangible words like "fright". That is, does she "merely" (really hard to say merely here... she is impressive) have remarkable reading skills or does she ALSO know what most of those words mean (a well-developed vocabulary)?

   As an example -- I know the basic rules of pronounciation in German. So, you could hand me a paragraph written in German and I can read and pronounce it more or less correctly. There will probably be a bunch of words therein that I'll not know the meanings of, though. I'm wondering how big her working vocabilary is... Neat story in any event.

3. Tempscire
   March 6th, 2008 at 10:09 am

   Sid: it says she talks like she's 1, but reads like she's 7, so I think she's "just" clever about making the right sounds for letters on sight rather than really understanding what she's reading.

4. Ronnie
   March 6th, 2008 at 10:42 am

   My son developed similar reading skills at a similar age. It can happen.

5. Louise
   March 6th, 2008 at 11:20 am

   I wonder what Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker would make of this tape.

   Obviously infant humans have tremendous unacknowledged skills as semioticians. Perhaps watching the signing show at such a very young age simply developed her strengths in interpretation of signs that much faster. At what age did she begin to view the program?

   For Elizabeth, personally, the struggle will be for her to develop knowledge of what the words (both as spoken and written) are referring to. She obviously has mastered the phonics of the process called reading, which is understanding the sounds that the combinations of written vowels and consonants.

   As a matter of human study, though, I wonder who will be setting up a child study lab that trains pre-toddlers to associate sounds and gestures with letters?

6. Elagie
   March 6th, 2008 at 1:02 pm

   My daughter was reading at this age, though she wasn't talking (The reading was evident when she would play the Between the Lions computer games where you had to pick the box matching the word that was spoken.) When she finally talked at about 2 she spoke in grammatically correct, complex sentences. She could read anything without stumbling over even polysyllabic words. She had and has an unbelievably vocabulary -- always used in context.

   Everyone has his or her own talents. Early reading is just one. Maybe it'll all even out in the long run (the rabbit doesn't win the race, after all) -- and unless a good reader is motivated to put his or her brainpower to good use, it's nothing more than a parlor trick. (That's why we treated my daughter's skills as commonplace -- she went to preschool thinking reading and math were things every three year old could do.)

7. Shish
   March 6th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

   My daughter could read at 18 months. Her mother was a librarian and she was constantly surrounded by books before she could walk. By the time she started school she could recite lengthy passages from Lord of the Rings from memory.

8. ChrisM70
   March 6th, 2008 at 1:51 pm

   It was nice of the idiots at the local news station to turn this girl's story into a promo device for one of NBC's entertainment shows...

   Very Classy.
   I'm sure Edward R. Murrow would be proud.

9. Robin
   March 6th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

   My nephew started reading at 2. He's 3 1/2 now, and has learned the Greek alphabet. Upper case and lower case.

10. Paul
    March 6th, 2008 at 2:31 pm

    How incredible. I would like to see my future kids this way.

11. Christophe
    March 6th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    My old son can speak fluent [3 years old] English and French, but this is a stunner. Way to go girl.

12. Rosi
    March 6th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    So what? I could read when I was this old. It's not that uncommon. But the child doesn't seem like she's actually intelligent, just like she has picked up reading quite early.
    It's funny though, I was really precocious as a child but I wasn't given any mental stimulation so I'm pretty much average now... which is annoying. I always think about what I'd be like if I had recieved extra work, or skipped a year (I didn't even learn anything new at school until about year three/ third grade).

13. VonSkippy
    March 6th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    Impressive of sorts - but way too early to tell if she'll continue to grow intellectually at that rate or not.

    My oldest girl could barely pick her nose and walk at the same time when she was a year and a half. Now she's doing her post-doc studies at UT-IMCB.

14. tona b.
    March 6th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    It's funny, but understandable, that her parents are worried that something is wrong, but what happened is that they did everything right!

    1. Both parents are speech pathologists.
    2. They read to her a lot.
    3. They taught her sign language.

    There's history of teaching kids sign language when they are infants/toddlers, like before they learn how to talk or if they have hearing problems. So, it's no surprise that these techniques, applied to a healthy child, helped make her proficient at reading.

    My boyfriend could read by 2 years of age. He's more than fine now; in fact, he's the smartest person I know!

15. Natalie
    March 7th, 2008 at 1:10 am

    How funny... that reporter is the anchor for my local news station, and the doctor in the video is my little sister's pediatrician! I'd never seen this video before; it's really interesting.

16. Jay
    March 7th, 2008 at 1:54 am

    I developed the same skills @ 108 months.......

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