Hyperlexia and ASD?

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Yes I have hyperlexia. I used to think some of my language problems were weird but they're common in at least the original definitions.

They include:

* Early decoding skills
* Severe delays in written language comprehension
* Even more severe delays in spoken language comprehension
* Echolalic language (after a delay, after a loss of speech)
* Eventual use of complex echolalia to appear to be using plausible expressive language
* All of the various problems that come with having expressive language superficially outstrip receptive language in big ways (these problems persist even after learning to use expressive language consistently for communication, which happened quite late)

That kind of assumes that hyperlexia and autism each mean roughly one thing each, so a person like me by that definition would "have both".

That's not how I see myself, so I assume what I'm about to say is only true for me and anyone like me.

So... how my brain works is how my brain works. I only have one brain and that brain works in various ways. If you look at my brain from the angle of autism it matches quite well. If you look at it from the angle of hyperlexia, same. But autism and hyperlexia are ideas, not things. My brain is all that's real, autism and hyperlexia are two word/concept-based ways to describe people like me in certain ways. But they are not things that must be divided from each other, distinguished, etc. in any given person.

So for someone like me they're simply two ways of looking at one thing. For someone to only be seen as having one or the other, all that needs to be true is that one describes them but not the other. If you can't distinguish them in a single person, that means both describe them well enough so you can say they "have both" even though they really just have one thing being described two ways.

Things like this are why I hate words, they obscure the reality underneath all the fancy ideas.

WRT being the opposite of dyslexia... I always thought of myself as having most traits of dyslexia, except the decoding problems and a couple other things.

Thanks for the reply. I guess I am just trying to understand how hyperlexia can be seen outside of ASD when it has so many of the diagnostic criteria of ASD. I know it is separate, and I know a lot of people with ASD do not have it. What is hard for me to grasp, though, is that someone could have hyperlexia and NOT have ASD because the other characteristics of hyperlexia (that do not involve the reading skills) seem too much like ASD to not be ASD.

I wouldn't call it the opposite of dyslexia. Hyperlexia does include having a natural talent for reading, of course; but if your comprehension is at the same level as your reading ability, you're not hyperlexic, just gifted.

Hyperlexia is what happens when you can pretty much read anything written--way ahead of your ability to understand the material, and almost always ahead of your peers' reading ability. Your comprehension ability, though, could be behind your peers', and that's where the trouble starts--your teacher thinks you understand what you're reading when really you're only decoding it.

Of course you can be both gifted and hyperlexic, and that can be a very odd state of affairs--you might be capable of reading four grades ahead, but capable of understanding only one grade ahead, and your hyperlexia might never be detected. That was my situation--I could not understand as much as I could read; but since I always more or less kept up with my peers, the learning disability wasn't detected. But since my comprehension ability has caught up to my reading ability (mostly because I just hit ceilings on both of them), I no longer consider myself to be hyperlexic. There's no reason to write things that are more difficult to read than a post-graduate level anyway.

Yes, I think so, and for me it has gotten worse with age. I think that is why many of us need a more rigid path in life; not to get lost in it. There are so many of the categories of agnosia that are like mini deaths. I have delt with Alexithymia off and on in my adult life and it is horrible, but I can't imagine being faceblind and not recognizing loved ones. Some of the stuff we deal with is like having dementia and being fully aware of it.

I also loved TV when I was young; I recently was reading about mirror neurons and couch potatoes and how we learn by watching others, vicariously experiencing what they experience. Some people with extremely sensitive mirror neurons actually feel someone touching them when watching someone being touched.

TV gives us the ability to live thousands of lifetimes within a lifetime from a vicarious standpoint (if our mirror neurons are working properly).

After not being able to watch TV for an extended period of time and having trouble with vision and processing new visual experiences, my visual memory is often related to TV rather than actual occurrences in my life. A lifetime of memories watching TV and exposure to hundreds of thousands of personalities, places, and experiences is a new experiment for human beings.

They say when a person gets older they remember things from the distant past; interesting that it might be a television show rather than real life. But as far as the subconcious is concerned, TV is real life. As long as the memory is working properly, we have access to much of it.

Yeah, this is similar to what happened with me, and I have hit both ceilings, I think. I also think this continues to affect how I use language.

Given my limited knowledge of hyperlexia, I voted no. I'm not even at this present moment capable of reading a simple wikipedia article. It's my day off meds. Anyway I was very slow to learn how to read and spell and all that. I always struggled with reading comprehension, so much that I didn't read much until all those Goosebumps/ Harry Potter books came out. Even then I struggled with comprehension. Actually recently I just got my comprehension up to speed, which felt like I had some super power but only did I realise this is how people normally comprehend writing.

So yeah, not hyperlexic.

Oh, definitely. Learning to read was one of the best things that ever happened to me, language-wise. Learning language when you're getting peppered with the auditory version is tough; learning language when you have it right there in front of you, in black and white (literally), for you to study as long as you like--that's much easier.

I still think that written language is my first language--spoken/heard language is harder for me. I did a lot of imitation and pre-recorded phrases before my reading ability allowed me to understand the symbolic nature of the thing.

It might seem like a small distinction, but "This is what you say in this particular situation" is not the same thing as "This is what you say when you want the other person to know this particular fact." It's the first one I was capable of before I learned to read, and the second one I learned to do after I learned to read and really got the hang of what language was for.

Ah. Then I should vote "no". But does one necessarily have to be GIFTED to fit that? I'm not gifted, but my comprehension has always been at the same level as my ability to read.

Hm, I guess I should make it clearer.

Comprehension >> Reading: Dyslexic.
Reading >> Comprehension: Hyperlexic.

Reading = Comprehension, both ahead of grade level: Probably gifted.
Reading = Comprehension, both below grade level: Probably delayed.

However, if you're hyperlexic and gifted simultaneously, then you are generally ahead of your peers in school in most subjects. (Think of "gifted" as "good at school" for this purpose.) However, your hyperlexia means that you probably have issues with reading comprehension-- so your comprehension ability can be at grade level or ahead of your peers, but is way behind your personal ability to read the text.

So, for me, in the third grade:
Reading comprehension ~3rd grade.
Reading ability: ~10th grade.
General academic aptitude: ~5th grade material.

This would be the giftedness/hyperlexia combination. I was able to understand about what a third-grader could understand from a story--people's motivations, for example; the plot, the read-between-the-lines stuff. However, I could read well enough to read adult-level text; and I was a couple grades ahead when it came to general learning.

One memory I have of being in third grade was reading the autobiography of someone who had broken her neck. She was seventeen at the time, and I remember reading that and thinking, "She's so stupid! She thinks she's going to die. Doesn't she know that you can survive breaking your neck?" (Yeah, I was a bit of a little snot back then.) I had a good grasp of the medical situation involved, but had very little ability to understand the motivations of the person in the narrative, nor the between-the-lines feelings. I took everything quite literally then, and it wasn't until high school and English lit class that I really learned to do a lot of the between-the-lines stuff.

Ironically, I was also doing 1st grade math when I was in the 3rd grade. I've never been particularly consistent with schoolwork--never really kept to grade level to begin with. But of course when you are good at something, they label you "gifted" and insist you must be good at everything else too...

Last edited by Callista on 18 Apr 2011, 10:11 am, edited 2 times in total.

Thanks for the explanation. I was a bit confused about it all myself.
It reminds me of how I can make people (including native speakers) believe I know foreign languages by reading passages out loud, even though I have no idea what I'm saying. That's probably not the same thing though.

I have aspects of both hyperlexia and dyslexia. I learned how to read at just 3 years old and my comprehension skills are far behind and still are. But at the same time I constantly reverse letters, numbers, and certain days can barely read a simple word. Mine is an extreme difference. It varies constantly. Some days I am able to read medical text and understand most of it, mainly psychology and even able to correct some of their mistakes but other days when my illness is acting up can barely read a sentence. My decoding skills usually are higher in the past than my grade level (when I was in 7th grade it tested at college level) but if you have given me that test now, I would probably score below college even though I graduated. The only reason why I scored so high during the 7th grade was because I had the same test twice, once in the beginning of the year and the other at the end of the year to see if you have learned. Luckily for myself, I memorized everything and got everything right. Mine is learned. When I type things out, I sometimes write entire words backwards. So in the end I don't know if I have hyperlexia or dyslexia or both. I don't think its possible to even have both. Also, I have high functioning autism.

In the past I often found myself using words from the English language, when writing, that I knew were correct in context, but later had to look up in the dictionary to find out what they meant.

And, listened to common phrases in language heard a thousand times like stuffed shirt knowing it meant something bad about a person, but being overwhelmed with a picture of a shirt and stuffing, only to realize much later in the life that it was a person with no personality.

That makes me wonder if taking things literally is related to issues with comprehension.

I think for me it was kind of a blessing also, because while I knew that many of the things were bad that I was called in middle school, I didn't know what they really meant because they were slang. I guess I was lucky there was no internet and access to an urban dictionary, because it might have made the situation more depressing.

Even now when I hear people talk about white trailer trash; I just think about trash in a trailer and how the words flow together nicely and don't really picture a negative connotation towards the people it is directed at, although I know it is a negative statement toward those people.

And finally, is the general condition of naivety related to the comprehension issue and possibly hyperlexia, in that maybe it makes it worse.

Same.



Is that what stuffed shirt means? OKAY THEN.

Seriously, I knew it was negative, but I didn't know that. Lots of idioms, I recognize by context without knowing what they literally mean. I intellectually know, so I can stop and translate, but not in real time.



Yeah, I get this too. There were a lot of words I learned were "bad" because I repeated them.

I was/am hyperlexic. I was asking questions incessantly by the time I was 9 or 10 months old--mostly "What's this?" and "What's that?"--trying to find a verbal label for everything. I taught myself how to read when I was about two and when I entered grade school my verbal IQ was in the 150-160 range.

Hyperlexia is often associated with developmental abnormalities of the right hemisphere, so it often occurs with NLD/Asperger's. I have all three. I have severe right hemisphere/white matter deficits and a great deal of left hemisphere compensation.