does this sound like hyperlexia?

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I'm still not totally sure what hyperlexia is and it's hard to find information about it ... anyway ...

When I was a child I had a huge vocabulary and read at a very high level. I was reading all the time. I don't remember my earliest years very well, but I remember - when I was six or seven - reading books that would be considered fairly advanced (e.g. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, etc) and really loving them, but the odd thing is that I didn't actually understand most of what I was reading. My mom tells me this sort of thing started when I was a toddler, but I don't remember that.

I've wondered about that a lot, wondered how that worked and whether it meant I was smart (reading at a high level and genuinely enjoying it) or stupid (not understanding much of it). In middle school my comprehension of what I read was still below the level of what I was actually reading, but beginning to catch up. By high school I understood what I was reading.

Anyway, I'm just curious. I still write/read much better than I speak and have always felt that written words were my "first language," as opposed to spoken words. It would be interesting to have a name for this.

I have had the same kind of experience when I was younger. I would be able to read advanced words for my age but not have the reading comprehension. My reading comprehension is and always has been below the ability to simply read and pronounce the words. I have seen on different sites that indicates both lower and higher intelligence depending on what site you see it at. There is also links with autism for hyperlexia. There is also a lack of social skills and the symptoms match up with autism if you check it out by looking on Google. I used to go to some of the sites because of my experiences. I also have dyslexic mistakes at times. Nothing to do with hyperlexia since they are opposites of each other. There are times where I can't process the words and it looks like a different language. Other times I am able to read doctor and scientific books. Two opposite extremes with me. I started reading very simple things at 2 years old but truly started reading at 3. Now I can't stop reading particularly of psychology and current events. I read close to 24 hours a day (or it seems like it).

Sometimes that happens to me too - where I can't read at all - but only when I am having sensory/cognitive overload. I lose my ability to process/comprehend spoken language long before losing my ability to process written language.



So do I. I lost my reading glasses once, and had no idea what to do with myself. I was like I no longer had a life.

Yes.

Your experience is similar to my own.

Thanks for answering.

Anyone else? Any hyperlexics hanging around? I'm curious what your experience was like ...

I had good vocabulary and liked to read books in one sitting, as I could never find the motivation to pick up a book and continue from where I left off last time. I also read almost as well if the book is upside down. Never been formally diagnosed with hyperlexia though.

Reading more online, it kind of looks like one of these diagnoses that parents will try to get put on their child instead of autism because they don't want an autism diagnosis. Even though children who develop language this way have social issues, stimming, etc. Another thing I read said that all hyperlexic children also are ASD.

It seems to me like something that just shows up occasionally on the autistic spectrum.

I have not been diagnosed with hyperlexia, but I can definitely relate. I learned to read between the ages of 2 and 3, and have been reading well above my age level since then. I powered through the Little House on the Prairie series at age 5, when most of my classmates were still learning how to read. And I've always been an avid reader, generally preferring to spend time alone reading rather than socializing with others. But some of the things I've read say that hyperlexics often have poor reading comprehension skills. I don't have difficulties with reading comprehension, unless I'm reading something that really doesn't interest me.

my mom is like that. She got sent to the principals office because the teacher did not believe she read the book they were reading in class. The principal quizzed her on the book, and told the teacher that she did indeed read the book.

Sh reads alot, it is her escape from reality which is not a pleasant one as she has a chronic illness and is in bed alot. She can usually read a whole clancy novel in one day if not interupted. I on the other hand am a slow reader and I have dyslexia to some degree and also have eye problems where my left eye will read independantly of my right eye sometimes, so I have to re-read a pharagragh more than once to understand it.

I wish I had hyperlexia though.

I was also one of those that learned how to read at age 3... first time it manifested was when I once took the bedtime story book from my dad and started reading it aloud to him... understandably he was baffled, but nevertheless helped me develop my reading skills... at age 5 I got a children's encyclopedia... still fairly simple, but rather complex for my age. A year later I could read German... usually in the form of Donald Duck comics which we'd get when driving to Germany to get groceries, cigarettes and alcohol.
I started school (1st grade) at age 7 (children usually start school at age 6 or 7 in Denmark, usually in 0th grade, aka. kindergarten grade) and my teacher was baffled that I could read aloud flawlessly... however during the weekly library trips with school i'd usually find a good book, but usually the teacher would tell me it was too complex for me... at one point I just had enough and i dared her to let me read the book and deliver a report on the contents. I got an okay and she told me what she wanted in the report. A week later I delivered a four page typewritten report... long story short, I got to read whatever I wanted

I've always had a good understanding of what I read and wrote. Shortly after I learned to read, I felt I had to understand it too, as the written knowledge was vast, and I felt that I could learn a lot from it.

I started reading at an early age. I was very very obsessed with Pinnochio and FORCED myself to be able to read some of the english version of the strange Italian folk tale..one of the things I liked to do when I went to my parent's friend's house was sit and stare very hard at the words to try and decipher..it was either that or play with his key collection and arrange them according to size..I was able to read a bit before kindergarten...but once I reached first grade I seemed to regress..I was mainly having serious trouble blending in with the rest of my class and my teacher hated me and I was always making her mad and I think the stress of that made me freeze up...She would furiously move me from reading group to reading group...We were arranged by how well we could read...I would get promoted then demoted..then sent next door...there was something about be that she was terrible incensed by..

You described me in that entire post. I learned to read at the age of two or three, and I had a large vocabulary for my age (usually involving medical text). When I was in elementary school, I actually enjoyed reading certain classic books and adult books (A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre, Anne Of Green Gables, which was for seventh graders at the time I was reading it, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Watership Down, an encyclopedia of religious matters, a book on the connection between body and mind, and numerous things on the MBTI), but I never really understood the meaning as well as I understood the vocabulary. I had poor comprehension for my age (I would have to read the text over and over to remember and understand it), and, for that, I was put in the Below Level class (also because I would read books if it had manga-like illustrations). I'm in late middle school now (eighth grade), and I've read The Oddyssey, The Idiot, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and other things, and I sometimes have trouble understanding the themes even now. I, like you, also have an easier time writing than speaking (I would sometimes repeat my own words or just feel unnatural speaking to people), and I'm also not sure whether I was smart or stupid because of the level at which I read, and the lack of comprehension at what I read.

I read somewhere that Asperger's can coexist with hyperlexia (or the other way around).

Maybe we're both hyperlexics.

Hyperlexia is more than reading at an early age; hyperlexia is when your reading skills are much higher than your general understandig skills (like if you are perfectively capable of reading every words in a book about WWII, but without understang what WWII was).

Sounds about right.

It sounds like some of the people posting on this thread were not hyperlexic, but gifted readers, because they understood the material. I definitely understood some of it, but there was a significant gap between what I could read and what I could understand, when I was growing up. I mean, I could understand the words - I had a huge vocabulary - and I was good at spelling, grammatical structure, etc, but I wouldn't comprehend what the book was actually about or the plot and characters, etc.

I used to love diagramming sentences in middle school, and making up my own languages.

I've always had that problem and still do to some extent, though it has gotten better. It's why I can't take timed tests. I would just read one question over and over, five or ten times, before understanding what it was asking.




Yeah, I always liked the classics, too. I've still never read any Dostoevsky, though. I went through a huge Tolstoy phase when I was about your age (I was twelve, thirteen) and decided I loved Russian writers, then tried to read Dostoevsky and didn't get very far. I have no clue why, though.

I recently reread the books I had read by Tolstoy (I'm early twenties now) and understood them much better.



I also read somewhere that all hyperlexics have Asperger's. I don't think the "experts" really understand what the relationship is, yet ... but it appears that most people who develop language this way have ASD traits.

Yes, I definitely had similar experiences to the rest of you. I could read my Pampers box at 2, and started reading books at 3. I devoured anything I could read (even really inappropriate stuff, like my parents' medical texts, which is how I learned about sex ). In 8th grade, we were given about a month to do a book report, and I managed to read The Prince and the Pauper in a couple of weeks before I decided I didn't like it, and read The Good Earth also. (I remember being confused that so many of my classmates did Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley" before I figured out that it had the shortest page count.)

I like to think I had good comprehension. Sometimes the subject matter went over my head, but that's because I lacked context or experience. In fact, I remember getting mad because one of my teachers singled out another student as someone who read quickly and retained what she read. I was like, "What about me?" I think you have to be interested in the subject matter to have good comprehension. Like Moby Dick. I read it one summer when I was about 10, and man, those whaling chapters were tough.

I was really good at spelling. I always aced spelling tests, and I didn't even have to study. One time my friend asked how I did it, and I just shrugged because I really didn't know. I just saw the word in my mind.