@Val123 – No, biological evolution can’t work this fast, but the capability to understand and speak a language is something humans possess innately. There’s a neurological basis in the so-called Wernicke and Broca areas in our brains. But we need to learn reading and writing and it takes time.
The capability to recognize patterns (in nature) and associate them with something else is also something humans possess innately as well. But the associations is something we learn and cultural evolution can speed up the process. Let’s take Native Americans who lived 5000 years ago as an example. There are two ways a child can learn about animal tracks in nature which might look like this
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3766117/2/istockphoto_3766117-animal-tracks.jpg
1) It spots an animal which runs away, then takes a good look at the tracks left behind.
2) There is no animal in sight and a teacher points to a particular track on the ground and then describes the animal it belongs to
Interpreting signs in nature was key to human survival. Superior pattern recognition capabilities is a result of biological evolution over tens of thousands of years. When our distant ancestors invented written language our brains were more than ready. This article explains the history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
Now what about the speed of reading? Like the experienced ancient hunter, an experienced reader can process patterns and find the correct associations much faster than an inexperienced one. Why? Here’s the neurobiological explanation:
Hebbian theory describes a basic mechanism for synaptic plasticity wherein an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from the presynaptic cell’s repeated and persistent stimulation of the postsynaptic cell. The theory is often summarized as “cells that fire together, wire together”. It is commonly evoked to explain some types of associative learning in which simultaneous activation of cells leads to pronounced increases in synaptic strength. Such learning is known as Hebbian learning, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
So you @Val123 as an experienced reader will take whole chunks of sentences and translate them into meaning in an instant like “biological evolution can’t work this fast”. You don’t scan this letter by letter which would be the other extreme. Your son is probably somewhere in between. He will recognize short common words like “work”, “this” and “fast” right away, but not very long words and/or unknown words. Maybe he’s seen the word “biological” only a few times. This would slow him down significantly.
Yes, reading much slower in most cases is due to lack of practice.