"Me, I'm skeptical. I mean, even language-gifted kids (and since I'm now a linguistics professor, I think it's safe to say that was an accurate description of me) don't somehow spontaneously start to read without all the right buttons having been pushed by the environment."
It depends on what you mean by that.
Keep in mind this was the mid-1960s. One of the things that was very much in vogue then were TV commercials that would have a blank screen except for some text, and an announcer reading that text. (I can still picture VW ads in the typeface VAG Rounded from that era.) So allegedly I picked up what that was from those commercials.
I can remember a twisted steel wire book holder, keeping the pages apart, because I wasn't patient enough to hold the books in one place on my own. I can still see that room, and I know we lived there when I was about that age.
I don't remember this, but one story is we were visiting my great-uncle and great-aunt when I was in the range of 3-4. I was leafing through Time, and my great-aunt commented to my mother about how the pictures in Time could interest one as young as myself. "He's not looking at the pictures -- he's reading it." My great-aunt wouldn't believe this until I was brought over and read aloud from the magazine. (The photographer in me says, odds are, I was looking at the pictures, too, but that's another issue.)
I read nothing but non-fiction until I was eight. Until then, I read things like Golden Wonder Science books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage History of WWII -- that sort of thing. When eight, my mom gave me Heinlein's Red Planet as a "bridge" between fiction and non-fiction, as she thought I was getting too narrowly focussed.
As usual with statements of the form, "kids don't {x}," (or, "people don't {x}") my reply is, "Most kids may not. But some do."
I am reminded of this article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/3118/):
"Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps--thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn't really seen enough specimens to generalize."
Re: Round O and crooked S
It depends on what you mean by that.
Keep in mind this was the mid-1960s. One of the things that was very much in vogue then were TV commercials that would have a blank screen except for some text, and an announcer reading that text. (I can still picture VW ads in the typeface VAG Rounded from that era.) So allegedly I picked up what that was from those commercials.
I can remember a twisted steel wire book holder, keeping the pages apart, because I wasn't patient enough to hold the books in one place on my own. I can still see that room, and I know we lived there when I was about that age.
I don't remember this, but one story is we were visiting my great-uncle and great-aunt when I was in the range of 3-4. I was leafing through Time, and my great-aunt commented to my mother about how the pictures in Time could interest one as young as myself. "He's not looking at the pictures -- he's reading it." My great-aunt wouldn't believe this until I was brought over and read aloud from the magazine. (The photographer in me says, odds are, I was looking at the pictures, too, but that's another issue.)
I read nothing but non-fiction until I was eight. Until then, I read things like Golden Wonder Science books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage History of WWII -- that sort of thing. When eight, my mom gave me Heinlein's Red Planet as a "bridge" between fiction and non-fiction, as she thought I was getting too narrowly focussed.
As usual with statements of the form, "kids don't {x}," (or, "people don't {x}") my reply is, "Most kids may not. But some do."
I am reminded of this article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/3118/):
"Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps--thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn't really seen enough specimens to generalize."