Emma Hartnell-Baker taught herself to read at the age of three.
 

She was highly motivated to read Enid Blyton stories independently. This intrinsic motivation, combined with early literacy experiences, enabled her to acquire reading without formal instruction.
 

Emma is AuDHD and a natural pattern seeker. She describes an enduring focus on identifying and systematising patterns, which is now expressed in a deep interest in the mathematics of how words map between speech and print.
 

Conditions supporting self-teaching

Emma was raised in a language-rich home environment where shared reading was frequent. During these interactions, her mother, an infants teacher, often pointed to the words while reading aloud. This supported early alignment between spoken and written language, enabling the development of print awareness alongside oral language.

Emma demonstrated strong phonemic awareness. This facilitated early sensitivity to the segmental structure of speech and supported the recognition that spoken words correspond systematically to written forms.

Through repeated exposure to text, she engaged in statistical learning, extracting regularities in grapheme–phoneme correspondences across words. Repeated readings of familiar texts enabled prediction, reinforcing connections between orthography and phonology.

She was able to use set for variability, adjusting phonological interpretations based on lexical knowledge and contextual constraints. This process supported the refinement of word recognition and contributed to the development of stable orthographic representations.

These processes were supported by advanced oral language skills and a home environment characterised by rich linguistic input and access to books.

Her younger sister also demonstrated early self-teaching, beginning to read at age two.

Self-teaching and orthographic learning

Self-taught readers engage in the process described in the Self-teaching hypothesis.

They:

• detect correspondences between graphemes and phonemes

• generate candidate pronunciations through decoding attempts

• refine these through set for variability and contextual feedback

• store successful mappings as orthographic representations

This process supports orthographic learning, enabling increasingly rapid and automatic word recognition.

Accent and phonological representation

Self-teaching occurs within the learner’s own phonological system.

In Emma’s case, this was Received Pronunciation.

The phoneme–grapheme mappings she established were shaped by her spoken language. This highlights that reading acquisition is grounded in the learner’s phonological representations, rather than a fixed or standardised pronunciation system.

From self-teaching to system design

Emma’s pattern-seeking profile and continued focus on the structure of language have led to the development of a novel computational approach to word mapping.

She has developed an algorithm with the capability to:

• map words across the English writing system in both directions (speech to print and print to speech)

• align grapheme arrays with phoneme arrays

• accommodate variation in pronunciation through flexible, accent-sensitive mapping

This work reflects an extension of the same processes observed in early self-teaching, formalised into a system that makes speech–print mapping explicit and accessible.

Implications

Self-taught readers demonstrate that reading acquisition depends on the successful mapping of speech to print and the formation of stable orthographic representations.

However, not all learners are able to access this process through exposure and instruction alone.

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The Self-Teaching Reader technology (MyReadie) is being designed to make these mappings explicit, supporting the processes underlying orthographic learning and enabling a wider range of learners to engage in self-teaching and Word Mapping Mastery®, leading to orthographic mapping. It will be included in the MyWordz® technology system, which also includes the first One-Screen AAC, MySpeekie®. It is currently being approved for use in Australian schools through Safer Technology 4 Schools and is being considered within the DfE EdTech Testbed Pilot. The DfE EdTech Testbed Pilot is a Department for Education programme that trials education technology in schools to evaluate its impact on teaching, learning, and inclusion.