ABSTRACT

The exceptionally gifted children described in the preceding chapters differ radically from their age-peers on almost every variable studied. The remarkably early development of movement and speech gave these children a considerable advantage in acquiring and processing information, and thereby strengthened crystallized intelligence. This advantage was further enhanced by the astonishingly precocious development of reading; 14 of the 15 children entered school with the reading skill and experience of children several years their senior. In the majority of cases the children’s astonishing verbal abilities were accompanied by a mastery of the skills of numeracy which clearly qualified them, at age 4 or 5, to undertake the maths curriculum more usually offered to seven-or eight-year-olds. The children’s reading interests, their hobbies and enthusiasms, their play preferences and their friendship choices were so incompatible with those of their classmates that from their first few weeks at school the majority of the subjects experienced extreme difficulty in establishing positive social relationships with other children of their chronological age.