Describes the reading skills of postkindergarten precocious readers. Finds no meaningful weaknesses in their average skill pattern; their strengths mirrored weakness identified among disabled readers; they were especially rapid text readers; they drew on especially strong phonological analysis skills as well as orthographic processes; but average…

In two six-month longitudinal studies of intellectually advanced preschool children, letter naming time and background digit span were moderately good predictors of concurrent reading achievement, while no other standard cognitive indices, including mental age, were associated with reading achievement. Both memory span and retrieval were related…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…