Will my toddler be able to read any words by the time he is 3?
70%
chance
My son was born on 10/14/19, so he's a little over two and a half. He loves cars and he is interested in letters and words, so he often asks me what the different words say on the cars. In context (i.e. on a car he has seen before, where he has asked me before what the word on the car says) he can remember that a word on one car says "TOYOTA" and a word on another car says "Jeep". He can't yet generalize that to confidently identifying the word "TOYOTA" on a car he has never seen before, though.
So my question is whether, by the time he is 3, he will be able to read any words when I just write them on a whiteboard out of context, based on the letter-shape-pattern, like adults would, or whether it will take him longer to generalize from where he is currently at. I think it seems obvious to me that he should be able to do this, because he is paying a lot of attention, I am happy to help him learn, and five months is a long time. My wife thinks probably this is a hard skill and most likely he will not be able to do it by 3.
This market will resolve YES if he is able to demonstrate a normal human ability to identify some words like "TOYOTA" written on a whiteboard with pretty high reliability by the time he is 3. I'm not going to decide exactly what test to use -- I will use my judgment based on generally observing his capabilities in a variety of tests and situations. If he can only recognize a word correctly like 20% of the time, or only when I write it exactly like the "TOYOTA" font, or something like that, then that's a NO.
If somehow I absolutely can't figure out whether he can read or not, or if he dies before the age of 3 or something, I may resolve N/A.
Enopoletus Harding 12 days ago
Seems unlikely.
Handdara bought M$10 of NO12 days ago
Based on my own experience of childrearing, I think it's harder than you anticipate. But if you hothouse him hard enough, maybe? I'd feel more confident if you could give us more precise resolution criteria, becasue there's quite a lot of room for interpretation with this kind of thing, and parents are notoriously partial judges (however rationalist they may fancy themselves!)