Anyone else with Hyperlexia?

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I am curious if anyone else here has Hyperlexia? If so, how do you cope with it?

Cope with it? I enjoy it.

Cope? With what part? I have gotten over most my auditory recognition problems by age 9 except for a lingering central auditory processing disorder. I loved being able read. I love being able to recognize words no matter the orientation (right side up, upside down, sideways, mirrored etc. I love being able read sentances at a time instead of individual words or letters.

Cope with it? It saved my sanity.

The main difficulty I have now as an adult is retention of content. I can read very quickly, and I can spot errors such as misspelled words just flipping the pages of a book; but if I am to retain the content, I have to force myself to read very slowly, sometimes over and over. If I do this, however, I can comprehend much more than the average reader. The challenge in college was to retain the material when I didn't have time to read everything meticulously. I really struggled for many years.

A friend who is a writer and editor (and also probably an Aspie) recommended that I read everything aloud, and while I am definitely not an auditory learner, it does help me to slow down my reading just enough to process some, if not all, of the content. I do tend sometimes to be seduced by the sound or feel of the language, and forget to think about what I am reading beyond the pleasure of saying and seeing the word!

To study I read just slow enough to I'd if something is a main pint or something I should know. I then write down a note and resume. Then I only focus on that material.

What exactly is hyperlexia?

Yes, I have come to realize I may be hyperlexic myself. I actually count the number of dots when there are a few in a row.

Okay, I just read the description for that disorder and realized the characteristics sound like me.

According to my mother, I was reading before I entered kindergarten at age five and when I did the Iowa tests, my vocabulary and spelling/grammar test scores were higher than the reading comprehension ones.

Edit: I was told many times when I was younger that my reading ability was way above average than my age group. This was by teachers and other adults.

Although I will note that I am on the odd side of hyperlexia. I was diagnosed at 4, but by 6 my reading comprehension was past grade level. The study habits of those who still have reading comprehension retention difficulties might be more appropriate.

I love being hyperlexic. I taught myself to read when I was 3, was reading the Lord of the Rings by the time I was 8. I can still remember entire sentences and phrases from things I read when I was a child, things that seemed particularly beautiful to me. I notice spelling errors and typos at a glance. I suppose sometimes I do read things without really processing/retaining them though, and then I have to read them again. I have a strong emotional attachment to words. On the other hand, if I try to do any kind of basic math I get dizzy and confused. It's like the numbers jump around and change constantly. And I have a terrible time processing and remembering things people say. But fortunately I've never had any serious problems because of these weaknesses. I've learned to try to visualize the things people say as printed words, which makes them easier to remember although I still process very slowly. And once you finish school, unless you go into a scientific or mathematical field you don't really need much mathematical ability, and nowadays you can do calculations right on your phone. I was able to get through math in school without too much trouble until I reached the calculus level, which I was barely able to pass with a lot of extra help from my teachers. Geometry is fine because it's mostly visual, and if I try to treat numbers and equations as pictures and sentences, they are easier to process. I use the visual math materials at my Montessori preschool to reinforce my ability to process numbers.

The only practical difficulties I can think of now are really just based on the fact that most people process verbal communication better than written, and so people assume that speaking face-to-face is better than writing things down. My boss always wants me to go to training seminars even though I insist I won't learn anything from them, but I could learn everything from reading a book instead. Whenever someone says "I wanted to discuss this face to face" I sigh and prepare myself to focus all of my energy on understanding them, then usually ask them if they would mind writing down their main points or "confirming" our discussion in an email so I don't forget it. I tried to take notes once, but it didn't work because all my focus was taken by the written words and I stopped listening to what was being said. I also learn languages very well using textbooks and can remember and pronounce words very well when I see them written down, but I can hear the same word a hundred times and never have any idea what the word is, how it might be spelled, or what sounds it contains until I see it printed.

Some precocious ability to read without comprehension. If you comprehend what you read from the day you learn it however, this is not hyperlexia, this is more likelly giftedness.

Lack of comprehension is not necessary for someone to be hyperlexic. Hyperlexics often have difficulty with comprehension (but high ability at parsing), but many are perfectly capable at reading comprehension. My comprehension suffers if I get distracted by the beauty of the words, which can happen easily, but as long as I concentrate on reading I don't have difficulty with this. What is more common is a disability at processing speech.

Like I stated before I wasn't diagnosed with hyperlexia but my test scores from things like the Iowa tests (if anyone remembers those) had high scores on grammar and vocabulary, followed by a lower than average score on reading comprehension, and an extremely low score on the mathematics section.

I'm not sure if any of those would indicate hyperlexia at all, though.

It can't be diagnosed from these sorts of tests. It's not just your test scores, it's the way you read, and how (and when) you learned to read. If you learned to read at the normal age using the normal methods, you are not hyperlexic. If you learned to read early without being taught in the normal way, then you probably are. In my case, I was 3 years old when I decided to start reading (though I don't remember it). My mother claims that she "taught" me, but my father laughs at this and says that all she did was answer my questions when there was a particularly strange or difficult spelling, and otherwise I taught myself. He thinks I figured out what sound each letter made based on the alphabet song and from watching Sesame Street, and deduced the rest on my own.

My earliest memory of reading was at age 5 when I was trying to read a poetry book and was getting frustrated because I didn't recognize some of the words and was therefore unable to pronounce them. By this point my parents were so used to me reading on my own that they didn't feel like helping me, just called over "sound it out like you always do" without looking at what I was doing.

I began reading words out of a newspaper, aloud, to my mother when I was 18 months old. She would read me books when I was a toddler and skip over pages, or try to summarize what a page said instead of actually reading it out loud because she was tired. I would stop her and say "that's not what it says". By the time I was in kindergarten, they tested me and found out I had a grade eight reading level.

So, yes, I suppose I might be.

That could very well be why I become very, very annoyed with dating sites. Most of the people send messages that are so full of typos that I can hardly stand to look at them and I just delete everything.