Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
Some of us only need to take off socks.
I’ve heard in the past of supposedly successful attempts to teach children as young or younger to read. “Supposedly” because people do seem to lie/delude themselves a lot on issues like this, and I don’t recall any formal studies showing anything either way. The claim that I’ve heard, which as least sounds plausible, is that reading is really just another form of language, and young children are wired to pick up language fast. It does make sense; if young children can learn sign language, why not learn symbols on paper ? Perhaps the reason babies don’t learn to read is because we generally don’t try to teach them; people generally say things to babies, they don’t hold up signs.
Isaac Asimov claimed to have taught himself to read at 4 by realizing the doodling (letters, words) on the NYC subway system had specific meanings that went with spoken words, i.e., “Fulton Street” meant what he’d just heard.
Elizebeth Barrett sounds like quite a kid! She’s got MY respect!
And dang she’s cute!
According to my mother, I was speaking in full sentences at 18 months and could identify the country associated with any flag you presented to me (apparently I was rabidly obsessed with flags and countries as a toddler).
So I guess it’s not a huge stretch to think that another child might have fixed the same focus on learning to read instead… most small children tend to develop a very specific interest around that age, like dinosaurs or zoo animals or construction equipment.
…no that the head start got me anywhere faster in life, mind you.
I’m no expert, but I am a mom, so I read voraciously on toddler development and that kind of thing. Not to diminish her awesomeness in any way, but from what I’ve seen I do agree that it may not be indicative of her future intelligence in general.
Or maybe they just put that in the toddler books so those of us with regular ordinary kids feel better. 
this is pre-reading–the memorization. If the pics (the context) had been taken away, chances are he wouldn’t have known the words.
I think it’s great that this little girl is doing well. I dislike the performing dog aspects of it, and there is no reason to believe that she will go on to become the next Cecil Adams. :eek:
I didn’t count from age 2. I merely squared the number 8. Why I did so eludes me now. You can use the fingers and toes over, ya know. No comment re the 21 “toe”. 
According to my mother, I taught myself to read at just shy of age three and promptly taught my brother (then just under 2) also. She informs me I did this via watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company - which were, in fact, structured so as to make learning to read easy.
She was also fairly aggravated with me for teaching myself to read - she had been deliberately not teaching my brother and I how to read, because she was perfectly aware that the first two years of school focus largely on beginning literacy and she did not want the two of us to get into the habit of being bored and therefore discipline problems at school because we already knew the lessons we were being taught. As it turns out, my brother was a discipline problem in school largely because he was bored off his nut, which established a pattern of behavior for him that he never did get over. I was not. This is largely because of the two of us, only I actually enjoy reading - he doesn’t. He’ll do it on occasion, but it’s not a preferred passtime for him. The teachers - once satisfied with my proficiency - could just stick me in a corner with a book during reading lessons and I’d be fine. Him, not so much.
So it’s an impressive accomplishment for this little girl, but not really so big a stretch as to call it the next step in human evolution.
Yeah, lots of kids read somewhere around 18 months - 2 years.
My mom said that I started reading somewhere in there; apparently I was pointing at store signs as we drove by and calling out the store names. At first, she thought I’d just associated the sign with the name, until one day I pointed to a store we’d never been to and said something strange that she didn’t understand at first. I’d pointed at a sign with a French or Spanish word on it, and pronounced it phonetically in English.
This was 33-34 years ago… so this isn’t some new thing in toddlers. I’m maybe one out of 15 people about my age I know who read at a similarly early age, too.
Meh. I was reading before two - that’s when I startled Mom by being able to read printed signs. She doesn’t know how long I’d been reading, she’d just assumed I was mimicking and memorizing when I read my books by myself.
I’m still a voracious and extremely fast reader, although I do not use this power for good (being a huge consumer of lightweight, escapist scifi/fantasy :o).
I also process visually much better than via auditory channels - don’t try to tell me instructions, write them down! It can be a pain.
I’d say I’m pretty intelligent, but no genius. I was an overachiever in school but haven’t continued that trend in real life.
So I’d say that, like much “early” development, this doesn’t necessarily mean much in the long run.
Well, one sock anyway.
My mother did child care in the 70’s and one of the children was very bright girl. She had older children around and I think this helped her early advancement. She was walking by six months and talking very well before 12 months. At around 18 months she was reading. She stayed ahead of other kids throughout school.
The Littlest Briston just made the connection that the letters she loves so much (she sings the alphabet all day long) actually has a connection to the printed word.
In the last White Elephant exchange, Shirley Ujest included a Berenstain Bears book entitled “Too Much T.V.” Her supply of new books was running a little low, so I pulled that one out an gave it to her the other day. She looked at the cover and saw those two letters…
“T. V.”, she said, and then something clicked. She ran into the living room – “Teevee!”, as she pointed to the television. “T…V.”, pointing to the book. “Teevee! Teevee! Teevee!”, pointing to the television.
It’s neat to see a learning milestone like that happen right in front of you.
And I suppose I should include this pic from last year…
And then there’s John Stuart Mill, who was raised by his father to be a genius. “Mill was a notably precocious child; at the age of three he was taught the Greek alphabet and long lists of Greek words with their English equivalents.”
Spanish is much easier than English, being much more phonetical (more for my dialect than for others). Still, I learned to read without specific “coaching.” I saw Dad reading the newspaper, asked “what are you doing?,” he said “reading”, I asked for an explanation, he explained and read some things to me. Over a few days (less than a week as he recalled) I asked a few times “what does it say there,” then I stopped asking.
It wasn’t until several months later that my pre-kindergarten teacher yelled at my parents for “forcing their poor baby girl to learn to read.” I couldn’t read handwriting, but printed stuff, no problem.
It’s not so difficult to figure out that the “triangle with two legs” always sounds like “A”, if that’s the way your language behaves. Like I said, English is much worse for that.
So now, all we have to do is wait until she’s a teenager, then breed her with that guy that can hike on Everest in his shorts. Then we’ll have…I’m not sure what we’ll have.
Oddly I was thinking exactly and precisely the same thing.
Iceman + Reader Girl = A new super-intelligent meta-human who keeps the thermostat at 40 degrees F this saving the planet from global warming, and pushes language processing into the next evolutionary phase.
Precisely. 
Or they really didn’t teach her and she might be autistic, but the parents don’t realize it yet. Hyperlexia is part of how a parent who keeps a blog found out his son has autism. They thought at first he must be a genius because he spontaniously learned to read as a toddler and only later learned that level of language obsession is often a sign of autism.