No wonder they do not say "c lip ma rks" as their first words....

My favorite aunt used to let me sit in her lap when she was doing crossword puzzles, starting from when I was about two years old, and she taught me the letters as she filled them in. As a result, I learned my letters at the same time I was learning to talk, was able to read newspapers by the time I was three and a half. This is part of something known in linguistics as the child language acquisition period, and an languages learned after 4 or 5 years is considered a second language. This means I'm bilinagual in speech and pring. There were words I knew but had trouble pronouncing because I learned them be reading, not hearing them.