My son definitely could not read that well at 17 months but I think he was reading some words. At 12 to 13 months he was interested in the names of all the spices in our spice rack so I would pick him up and tell him the names as he pointed to them. He would then repeat the names--a little hard to understand what he was saying but I could make it out. He especially liked "Tarragon" and probably because he has a sister named Tara, but he sometimes laughed when I would ask my husband "is Tara gone?" He got to the point where he could point and say the names of some of them, but I knew he could have memorized the position of the spices in the rack as well as their names, so I knew that didn't count as reading, but he seemed interested in letters and words. He liked alphabet books and word books at that age. I think it was before he turned two that we got a McDonald's toy with Bugs Bunny dressed as a fortune teller. You could ask a question, pull a lever and words like Not Sure, Ask Again or Hopefully So would appear. He played with that enough that he could "read" the answers and that was definitely sight reading, but when I tried to get him to show his dad, he wouldn't do it and my husband kind of teased me about thinking a baby could read. He didn't tell me his older highly gifted son had read extremely early without being taught. He let me think I was crazy for a while.
At 2 1/2 when we discovered that we could spell out words and he could identify them and that he even liked to spell some words, we knew that he was really able to read. But even then, he wouldn't do it every time you asked him to. If he didn't feel like doing something, he just wouldn't do it. If we got the video camera, he would just laugh and clown around, so we quit trying.
