Hi PMc,

Sorry for getting off on a tangent before putting in an answer to your question -- my DS is 2.7 and at the level of reading easy readers. He did not read as early as your DS (15 months is truly exceptionally early), he was a late talker and perhaps half of his first "words" were letter sounds at about 18 months. He was reading a few words at about 20 months and fell in love with starfall, and seemed to learn to read from that, and now reads easy readers about 2nd grade level. I had assumed perhaps he would stall out at the level of recognizing single words and just wait a couple years to understand sentences but that did not happen. Then I assumed perhaps he would stall out at sentences with just short words but he pretty easily now reads words like deinonychus, thoughtful, etc. Beyond helping him navigate through starfall we provides barely any instruction. A few moments of fun games like, "can you find the word mommy?" if that counts.

He did stall out some in his drive to read after he had conquered the method of it - he understandably prefers to have mom or dad read to him for the cozy feel of that (and we enjoy that too of course, in moderation but not for multiple hours a day as he used to request). Now if we are busy he'll read to himself and seems to feel good about it. I'm happy for him that he has a way to entertain himself (and he needs a lot of entertainment).

There's hype about hyperlexia (a semi-professional early intervention assessor mentioned it to us at an evaluation for his late talking) but it's a very specific diagnosis that is unlikely (keeping in mind I'm no professional in the field) to have relevance to your DS. Seems like reading early is just par for the course for some bright kids.

I have a hard time getting a sense of the incidence of early reading, whether its just uncommon or is vanishingly rare. The incidence certainly seems to have increased over time perhaps with children exposed to more literacy-related materials. I can only guess though that at 15 months it's vanishingly rare. Many children of the people here on this website read really early and yet I know of no one in my community who has an early reader (except when they say early and mean 4 or 5 years old). Virtually all actual research on "early reading" refers to children able to read some words by kindergarten, there's not much to go on except anecdotes here.

Polly