Early Letter Recognition, Letter Naming, and Reading Skills in a Signing and Speaking Child

Abstract

This study consists of a longitudinal investigation of a young child’s acquisition of language and language-related skills in two modalities. The child, the hearing daughter of a deaf father and hearing mother, showed accelerated language development in both sign and speech. Moreover, she learned how to form the letters of the manual alphabet and to recognize and name alphabetic characters at a very young age. By her second birthday this child demonstrated the ability to identify all the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case form, as well as to print several letters unassisted. A few months later she was able to spell and recognize a number of words. Administration of several reading readiness tests at this time revealed quite advanced development for her age.