I remember people asking me if my son knew phonics and I thought he must, because it certainly wasn't sight reading if he wasn't looking at the words and was just hearing them spelled out.
At age seven I could see that he noticed unusual spellings of words that sounded the same and he could usually give the correct spelling--like knight and night. Knight was one of the spelling words the educational psychologist gave him during a test and he got it right. The psychologist thought this was unusual for a kid who had just turned seven and had not been taught this word. At that time it looked like he had a really good visual memory for words. Maybe when he was younger he could see the words in his head as I spelled them out. None of the other kids in my family ever did this.
