ABSTRACT
Exceptionally gifted children may demonstrate precocious intellectual, psychomotor and psycho-social development remarkably early in life. As discussed in Chapter 4, most of the children in this study were independently mobile at an age when their age-peers are still dependent on the help of their parents, and were expressing themselves fluently in complex sentences while age-peers were still mastering the skills of linking words into phrases. In common with extremely gifted children in previous studies, they acquired the skills of reading, writing, spelling and counting some years earlier than would normally be anticipated; indeed, the majority of these young Australians entered elementary school with the literacy and numeracy skills one would normally expect from a student in third or fourth grade.
