A longitudinal study of 287 New Zealand children challenges the belief that “starting earlier means staying ahead.”

Introduction: The Belief That Earlier Is Better

When the neighbor’s child starts reading at four, your five-year-old suddenly feels behind. The tutoring center tells you “it’ll be too late if you don’t start now,” and social media overflows with videos of three-year-olds breezing through English picture books.

Beneath this anxiety lies a single assumption: the earlier you start, the better you’ll do later. Get a head start and the gap will hold or widen. It sounds perfectly reasonable.

But is it true? Will a child who begins reading instruction at age 5 stay ahead of one who starts at age 7?

Interestingly, even among English-speaking countries, the age at which formal reading instruction begins varies widely. England and New Zealand start at 5; Finland and many European countries start at 7. If starting early were truly advantageous, children in countries that begin at 5 should consistently outperform. Yet Finland routinely ranks at the top of international assessments like PISA, while early-starting England shows no special advantage.

A research team in New Zealand spent six years answering this question. And their answer defied many parents’ expectations.

The Core Research Question

A team from the University of Otago in New Zealand — Sebastian Suggate, Elizabeth Schaughency, and Elaine Reese — asked:

“Does the age at which reading instruction begins actually affect long-term reading ability?”

Cross-national comparisons are confounded by differences in education systems, culture, and language structure. So the team chose to compare children within the same country (New Zealand) who started reading instruction at age 5 versus age 7.

How the Study Was Conducted

Study 1: Tracking 287 Children Over 6 Years

In New Zealand, most children begin formal reading instruction at age 5. However, some schools — such as Steiner (Waldorf) schools — delay formal reading instruction until age 7, focusing instead on oral activities, play, and storytelling. The research team leveraged this naturally occurring difference.

  • Participants: 287 children from New Zealand state and other schools
  • Comparison: Reading Instruction Age (RIA) of 5 vs 7
  • Duration: Two-cohort design spanning 6 primary school years
  • Measures: Letter identification, non-word reading (phonics ability), word reading, passage reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension

To ensure that “early starters doing better” wasn’t simply due to parental enthusiasm or home environment, the team controlled for:

  • Receptive vocabulary
  • Parental income and education
  • School-community socioeconomic level
  • Classroom instructional approach
  • Home literacy environment (how often books were read at home, etc.)
  • Reading self-concept (how much the child saw themselves as “a good reader”)
  • Age

Study 2: Additional Verification with 83 Secondary Students

To check whether Study 1’s findings held at an even later point, 83 secondary school students were additionally assessed on reading fluency and reading comprehension.

Results: By Age 11, the Gap Disappears

Early On, There Was a Clear Difference

Children who began reading instruction at age 5 outperformed the age-7 group in letter identification, non-word reading, word reading, and passage reading during the early years. Seeing only these results, you’d be tempted to conclude “starting early is clearly the right call.”

But the Gap Steadily Shrank

Over time, the children who started at age 7 caught up rapidly. And by age 11 (Year 6 of primary school), the reading ability gap between the two groups had completely disappeared.

The head start built over two extra years of instruction evaporated in roughly four to five years.

Late Starters Actually Pulled Ahead in One Area

In Study 2, when secondary students were compared, reading fluency (speed and accuracy) was similar between the groups. But the group that started reading at age 7 showed a tendency toward higher reading comprehension.

The ability to read text quickly had equalized — but in deeply understanding what they read, the late starters were actually ahead.

Why Would Late Starters Excel at Comprehension?

This is the most thought-provoking point in the study. The research team explains:

Reading is ultimately built on top of oral language ability. Children who began reading at age 7 likely spent the ages of 5 to 7 accumulating rich oral language experience through listening to stories, having conversations, and playing — rather than drilling letter decoding.

Think of it this way. While the child who started at 5 was learning letters and stumbling through sentences, the child who started at 7 was having conversations with parents and teachers, listening to stories, and practicing expressing their own thoughts in words.

The technical skill of decoding text can be learned relatively quickly even when started later — it’s a mechanical ability. But rich vocabulary, intuitive grasp of sentence structure, and the ability to read context — these build slowly over time through oral language experience, and they form the very foundation of reading “comprehension” later on.

Children who started at age 5 essentially traded some of this precious oral language development time for decoding practice. They led in reading scores in the short term, but that time could have been spent building deeper comprehension capacity over the long term.

Practical Takeaways

Don’t Be Swayed by Early Gaps

If a classmate is already reading sentences while your child doesn’t know their letters yet, anxiety is natural. But this study shows that gap is temporary. By age 11 it vanishes, and comprehension may actually favor late starters. A few years of early difference does not determine a child’s future.

Conversation Before Letters

If your child hasn’t started reading yet, that time isn’t being wasted. Rich conversation, listening to stories, expressing their own ideas in words — this oral language foundation becomes the bedrock of reading comprehension later on. Reading books aloud to your child, asking questions, and listening to their stories may be a more effective long-term investment than teaching letters.

Look for Depth, Not Speed

One of the most dangerous misconceptions in education is confusing speed with depth. A child reading faster than their peers doesn’t necessarily understand more. This study suggests that deep comprehension matters more than quick decoding in the long run, and that deep comprehension grows best when children have sufficient time to develop oral language skills.

Limitations

While this study offers important insights, several constraints should be noted:

  • The study involved New Zealand English-speaking children, so whether findings apply directly to languages with different writing systems (like Korean) requires further research.
  • The two groups attended different school types (Steiner schools vs. state schools), making it difficult to fully rule out effects of school philosophy or overall educational environment. However, the team minimized this by controlling for classroom instructional approach and various other variables.
  • Study 2’s sample (83 students) was relatively small, warranting caution in generalizing the reading comprehension findings.
  • The study compared only “age at which reading instruction began” — it did not directly measure what children specifically did during that time (which oral activities, types of play, etc.).

Despite these limitations, the 6-year longitudinal tracking and extensive variable controls lend considerable weight to the study’s conclusions.

Final Thoughts

Starting early doesn’t mean winning. And starting late certainly doesn’t mean losing.

Every child has their own developmental timetable. Whether a child begins reading at 5 or at 7, they ultimately arrive at the same place — perhaps even a deeper one. A parent’s role may not be to accelerate that timetable, but to fill the time with rich language experiences while the child grows at their own pace.

Source: Suggate, S. P., Schaughency, E. A., & Reese, E. (2013). Children learning to read later catch up to children reading earlier. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(1), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.04.004