Welcome to Hyperlexia III

First off, I had no idea this subreddit existed until it came up in a Google search! Reddit really does have everything.

I have a 14-year-old son with hyperlexia. He is also severely autistic. He's unable to have anything that would qualify as a conversation, he doesn't understand pronouns, and his reading comprehension (as well as his comprehension of speech) is very poor. While he speaks, his sentences are ungrammatical and often just seem like pure nonsense. He isn't really able to express anything but very simple concepts such as his immediate needs.

When he was 16 months old, he could say about 80 words, he knew all the letters of the alphabet, he could count to three, and he would talk and talk all day. I don't have much documentation from after that point in his life, but as I recall, he was reading pretty shortly thereafter. He was definitely reading unusually early whenever it happened.

Now I have a 16-month-old son. I've been concerned lately because his vocabulary is even bigger -- I estimate it's around 200 words right now. He's also started to recognize some letters, though this is inconsistent. (I thought he knew the letter A, but when I handed him a foam A this morning, he told me it was a V.)

Now, in many ways, my two sons are very different from each other. Many of the toddler's words are not nouns, for example, while I believe my teenager mostly (if not exclusively) had nouns at this point in his life. He tells you when he's happy. He shakes his head no. He points and follows a point, which my teenager did not do. He claps and waves. His receptive language is miles better than the teenager's was, and he follows instructions easily. In the past week or two, he's started asking, "How are you?" and when you reply, "Great, how are you?" he says "Good." This might be scripted, but I don't remember my teenager having back-and-forth interactions like that -- he still doesn't, really. The toddler imitates us a lot -- if I stick out my tongue, he'll stick out his tongue, for example. All of these are things we didn't know were autism red flags at the time but my teenager didn't do at this age, and in some cases for many years to come, if ever.

The toddler has hit all the big milestones, while my teenager did not (in fact, at this age, he would not walk for another 10 months.)

What does this sound like to you? Is this necessarily hyperlexia? (It's actually hard to find information about hyperlexia being associated with early speech as opposed to reading, more often delayed speech.) If it is, does it sound like it could be autism given the hurdles he's cleared? It seems like an awfully big coincidence that both my kids would have this highly unusual early language ability but one would be severely disabled while the other would be fine.

I should mention that I was an early reader (and talker), though this was well over 40 years ago and I don't know enough details to self-diagnose with hyperlexia. All I know is that my precocious reading ability was much talked about by my family during my childhood and even today. Opinions vary about whether I'm on the spectrum; I certainly had social difficulties when I was young but I've never been formally diagnosed.

So I have type 2 hyperlexia (autism and hyperlexia) and I have a question about how people read. I get really stuck on typos and grammar mistakes when I read. I think this is because I taught myself to read without phonics. I register whole words and they’re just there, in my brain. I want to know whether other people get stuck rereading sentences if the grammar’s wrong and whether it’s a neurodivergent thing or not.

Hi, my son is 3.5 and I'd like to get him some books to read to himself. Just nice and toddler proof (sturdy) but that are engaging with not massively long words but that he can read to himself. He learns words a lot by memory so most words he will just read on sight (as I believe most hyperlexics do) but storybooks are quite long so would like books that are not so long as to keep his attention as he doesn't have the longest attention span....especially at his age.

My son could do the abc and count to 100 by 16 months. We got him in home help by 2 as he did not talk. By two we could communicate with him though writing words and sign language. He was reading by age two. At 3 he was tested and instead on the person asking my son to do something, he read the adult instructions and completed the task. Because of that he got admitted into a special program and with in a week he was talking. After that he started started having some behavior problems. With the school help we worked them out. Socially my son does ok, though he does better with kids 2 to 3 years older then his then his classmates. We got him tested for autism 2 times because we see some steming behavior but both times they said only type 3. We were also seeing some major anxiety in our son so we been trying to find him some help outside school. Anyway that's the background.

Right now he is in kindergarten but split class, he spends half the day in a special unit where he does ok, but when he moves to the regular kindergarten class sometimes he does the work but others he refuses. When he refuses he starts to disrupt the class. I know he knows how to do the work, any ideas on how to get him to do the work, rewards or consequences don't seem to work?.

Do hyperlexia and twice exceptional often times go together? Would it even be possible to be nonverbal and 2E? I’m unsure about how testing or IQ tests go at this age especially if nonverbal/autistic.

My almost 24 month old (level 2 autistic) child is nonverbal. However since 20 months has known all his letters, colors, and numbers 1-10. I recently 2 months ago bought him an 11-20 puzzle thinking it would be our new goal and he already knew them without me teaching him (maybe learned from Ms Rachel?). He also knows shapes (and beyond normal like diamond, cross etc). He recently started to do some 3-6 piece jigsaw puzzles. We also realized recently that he can identify words (he could identify Blippi, mom, dad, Meekah, his sister and dogs names and a few others). Then after me showing him 6 new words exactly ONE time, he remembered them all the next day (eight, milk, snack to name a few). His speech teacher was intrigued so she wrote down some new words for him like lion, flower, etc and he was able to identify them immediately without being taught even once (I’m thinking maybe from TV or books). Not to say he’s reading but the pattern recognition is definitely there.

My point being I’m sure there is more that he knows that we don’t know. I know hyperlexia is considered a “splinter skill” of autism, and sometimes the comprehension isn’t there, but doesn’t it at least mean there is a decent level of intelligence there? (Also, he has a puzzle with numbers 1-20 that connect to an adjacent piece that has 1-20 pictured objects on it, and he can connect them all- unsure if he is counting the objects or has just memorized what picture goes with what number, but still impressive I feel?).

A little background; my son is currently 3.5 years old. He knew his ABC’s forwards, backwards, and out of context by 18 months. He could count well over 100 by then as well, but has always preferred letters to numbers. He taught himself to read by 2.5, and now, he’s obsessed with languages and alphabets. He’s learning French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese (he can read hiragana, katakana, and has started on kanji), with a passing interest in the Cyrillic alphabet.

All of my son’s learning is of his own volition. We don’t initiate it, but we do allow him to follow his interests and will provide resources once he has expressed a desire to learn! We just want him to be a happy, good human being, living his best life!

So, my question for any adult hyperlexics is this; is there anything you wish your parents had known or done differently when you were a child that would’ve helped you (socially, emotionally, or academically)?

Bonjour,

Je suis AESH en classe ULIS et j'accompagne une petite fille TSA depuis 3 ans. Elle a toujours porté un intérêt particulier pour les lettres, les mots, les enseignes, les logos, elle est très visuelle. Je l'ai toujours soupçonnée de savoir lire mais elle n'a pas décidé de nous le montrer, peut-être un manque de motivation. Lors de la lecture en classe, je note beaucoup de progrès en 3 ans mais encore des difficultés. Ma question est est-il possible qu'elle sache lire mais qu'elle ne nous le restitue pas ? Merci.

Hello, I sincerely hope this is the right place to post and I am not offending anyone by asking. I am happy to delete.

I am a reading tutor who is occasionally referred someone who I believe to be either a whole word reader – meaning they were taught to memorize whole words in the course of their educational career – or they are hyperlexic. In the absence of knowing anything about their history or how they have been taught, how would one differentiate between the two?

More importantly, I am thinking about how to intervene with this type of student who ALWAYS comes to me with comprehension struggles.(Not even sure I should be but that’s for another post. ) Would the teaching be different for hyperlexia versus whole word readers?

The way I tutor normally is to go back to decoding, because the typical student who comes my way has never gotten explicit phonics and that is the source of the comprehension difficulty.

My 3yo son attends 3K and the teachers say he keeps running out of the classroom. He LOVES school and he’s not necessarily trying to escape, rather it seems more so that he is curious and wants to explore or go say hi to other teachers. He is hyperlexic (he knew the alphabet A-Z at 2, and now reads 1st grade level books at 3) - loves books, loves puzzles. Any suggestions or ideas on tools that might help him stay in class or understand he can’t run out? It’s becoming a safety issue.

Thank you!

When I was a kid, I somehow taught myself how to read. I don't remember how old I was, but my parents told me that when I was in kindergarten, I was reading to kids who were older than me, and I graduated kindergarten at age 5, so I must've learned it some time before I was 5.

I don't remember any learning process. It was like I wished I could read, then focused on it, looked at some text on the TV, and was kinda magically able to decipher it.

It was around then, or maybe in early elementary school, that I would have my parents quiz me on grammar stuff like articles and plural forms for fun. Also, I had a tendency for "writing books" instead of drawing normally. I would also read anything as long as it was kind of bite-size or interesting-looking. The idea of reading a large book without any pictures, however, was intimidating to me because I associated that with "that's something for grown-ups".

Iirc, when I was reading, I was able to understand everything, so it wasn't just mere decoding. Where I tended to fall flat, though, was when it got into interpretation of the work ("What was the author trying to tell us?"), and forced reading and interpreting of texts in high school nearly completely killed all interest in reading for me.

For me to willingly crack open a book nowadays, I need to be really interested in it from the get-go. If that happens, I can read a 1000-something pages book in a weekend (idek if that's fast, but that's the fastest I've read a book without pictures while still retaining the full plot). But force me to read something that I don't care for or that's too abstract, and it takes me an hour to read a single page and I still won't retain any of it. Sometimes, even a longer Reddit post can be overwhelming, and I low-key wonder if that's a sign of inattentive ADHD or something.

Hello great sub, I already talked here about my case (hyperlexic with Asperger's and ADHD), I noticed something weird, in my native language (Arabic) I was reading extremely well since early age, yet I struggled (only in childhood) with the other languages I spoke, what do you think everybody?

Would the ability to recognise all the letters of the alphabet before being able to talk be considered hyperlexia? Mum said as baby - somewhere between 6 and 12 months old - i knew and was able to point to all the letters of the alphabet.

I'm interested to hear from other hyperlexic adults that like to learn languages. I feel like we have some advantages in learning additional languages, especially in adulthood when we can better control what resources and methods we use. Or at least we should have some advantages!

I am trying to learn Hebrew right now and it's going poorly because I can't read the text. Written Hebrew (for adults) has no vowel markings so I can't "decode" the written language. It's sometimes written with vowels but that's almost always either just for children or Biblical Hebrew (which isn't the same as what I'm trying to learn). I guess I need to get my hands on children's books. Has anyone encountered this problem with Hebrew or Arabic?

When I learned French I got pronunciation, spelling, some syntax, and some vocabulary (like nouns) effortlessly but I didn't ever achieve fluency because I have ADHD and wasn't able to apply myself to the stuff that's harder for me like conversation (because it's social) and grammatical rules (I never learned grammar rules bc the pedagogy for teaching grammar is not made for us).

What about you all? How has language learning worked for you.

I learned to read before I could speak, I wanted to read higher level books but my mom wouldn't let me. Eventually I got hiperfixated on "my weird school" when I was in first grade, a reasonable level. But I was still far ahead of everyone else, in both understanding what I'm reading and knowing the words. I do have autism and adhd. However strangely I can't write well, I can express myself pretty well verbally but writing can be really difficult.

My son's about to turn 6, and I'm just curious what other kids around his age with hyperlexia are into. I know alphabet lore is huge, he's not too into geography stuff, maybe a little more than other kids but it's not one of his "things". He's loved 20th century fox since he was two, loves alphabet lore, Roblox, and right now BFDI/battle for dream island is his big thing. That and computers, he likes animating and making his own videos and writing stories. We just realized he started posting his videos on YouTube, I'm pretty sure other kids like him have found them because some have a few hundred views in the couple weeks they've been up. Anyway, what do your kids like? Birthday/Christmas shopping for these kids is so difficult!

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post—my son is obsessed with numbers and letters. When we color or draw (chalk, paper, mangnadoodle, etc. OR if he finds anything bendable like a pipe cleaner or play dough -things like that- he will immediately come to me or my husband saying “Uppercase A” which means he wants to play the game where he goes through the alphabet in order and wants me to shape or write the uppercase and lowercase of the letter, then he thinks of a word that starts with that letter and he want me to shape or write that as well. He then moves on to the next letter. The farthest we’ve gotten is letter K because every time we play-he will go from enjoying the game to literally crying and upset and the only thing we can figure is he feels like he messed up somehow and he can’t handle it. It’s so heartbreaking because so matter how gentle or encouraging we are, he is still upset and then doesn’t want to play anymore. We tell him it’s ok to feel frustrated or sad and that we will keep practicing. Does anyone experience this or something similar?

My son is 21 months next week. He counts 1-20, knows numbers by looking at them or reading the word version. He knows his alphabet well and is practicing reading words. He’s able to add and subtract. My dad has hyperlexia, so there is a family history of it. Since the past 2 months we’ve been gearing up to this being a bit more than him being smart.

We did a home visit with his EI (he was previously delayed in speech a week before all of this came out), just to go over everything he’s been up to. And yeah, she is the one who finally made it sink in. She mentioned at daycare the older kids will run up and make him count fingers that they hold up, do addition and subtraction with objects, make him recite the alphabet. It’s to show off, they’re proud of him. But she did mention they’ve caught on that it is different.

So I asked “is it that different? Is this typical?” And she, who usually skirts around that concern when I have it, slowly shook her head and said it is not typical and he’s a few years ahead of where she’d expect with these things.

It was just hard hearing that his older peers have caught on, and to have her confirm my concern. She’s getting in touch with people in my very small state who will be better resources to us, and he’s going to be put on the waitlist for an eval when he’s officially 2. I truly see this as gifted, but it did stump me yesterday. I have no clue why it’s gotten to me so much. This is just a rant, maybe a call for parents or people who have lived this.

Hi. My son is 3y3m. I think he has hyperlexia. He knew his ABCs at 18 months. He could count to 100. He’s been reading since he was a bit over two.

Ive wanted to sign him up for a basic developmental screen just to see where he is emotionally and socially. He hardly ever makes eye contact with me when I try to talk to him. He often doesn’t answer me or my husband unless we keep asking.

He is not around kids his age often, but if he is, he completely ignores them. Sometimes he might say hey and he will play along side them but not with them. His cousin who is 6 mo younger asks questions, speaks in full sentences but my son doesn’t play with him and often ignores him when we visit. I do not compare my son to him or any other kids-it just makes me wonder if my son is experiencing delays.

My husband is against “testing” because he said he it makes him think that I think something is wrong with our son. Or I’m trying to create a problem. Or I worry too much. Or “he’s only 3 years old-everything is normal.” I have never thought there was a problem or something is wrong with our son. But I see no harm in identifying our son’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to development. Since he is so incredibly intelligent, we may be able to learn more about how he learns and how we can support him better. Maybe our son is introverted and just likes to be to himself-but maybe he just doesn’t understand how to interact with anyone that isn’t his parents or grandparents. I think he would do well in preschool, but my husband is a firm no on that front until our son is 100% potty trained because he “doesn’t want a stranger in the bathroom with our son.” My husband is a great father but I cannot understand his perspective. I’ve talked with our pediatrician very briefly but they don’t offer much at all.

Is there anywhere I can get a straightforward overview of why developmental screenings are beneficial and how they aren’t looking to diagnose all kids and sort them into categories like my husband thinks?

He's unable to speak properly and he's terrified of other children. He has echolalia and delayed echolalia but he can read well. He knows answers to specific questions like what's your name etc. but he is not able to have back and forth conversations. However when he wants something he is able to communicate exactly what he wants in full sentences. Other than that he babbles to himself, ingnores me when I try to speak to him or doesn't respond. He has been evaluated for autism and he doesn't have autism. He is OBSESSED with numbers and alphabet to a point where he converts every activity into numbers and alphabet in one way or other. He's scared of other kids and does not mingle with them. However he does parallel play and he's constantly staring at other children and curious about what other kids are doing. He's very sensitive to sounds from other children like laughter or crying but he doesn't show any other sound sensitivity. His social battery around kids runs out very quickly and we're forced to leave the park/library etc. early.

Is this something that'll resolve on its own as he grows? Does he need speech therapy? What can I do to help him not stress out when he's around other children? Will he ever make friends and be social?

Hey, everyone. What ELA curriculum do you like for homeschooling hyperlexic kids? (While we're on the topic, what other curricula do you use for other subjects?)

Do you leave the job of pulling thoughts out of your kid to the speech therapist? Or do you have tips/recs on helping your kid put his own thoughts and ideas on paper?

Thanks in advance!

I don't know what to say. I'm not a child anymore. I'm a lawyer, I often read documents others take weeks in a couple days and when I was a child 10-12, I was proud of reading a book a day and often used to read around 300 pages a day and now I can ready around 400+ if I have my house for myself and the lecture is interesting.

Once I read a 40-50 page book between recesses (We had two in my school) and my librarian refused to give me another book because she said "I was reading too much".

I never even considered this to be a problem.

If a certain child tend to have early age reading capabilities and also has good comprehension. can this specific case be called hyperlexia?

I’m truly baffled. In the last 3.5 weeks my son went from 3 consistent words (blue, green, and yeah) to about 65 words which I thought is maybe a sign he doesn’t have it?

He says 1-10, he knows which numbers are which, if we hold up our fingers he gets the correct amount. If I show him the number he says it correctly if I ask what it is. He counted to 14 this morning but we definitely haven’t worked on that yet since we’re trying to help him get 1-10 down pact. He heard it in a Ms Rachel video this morning I think

We have 5 different priddy books and can ask where xyz is and he guesses it correctly each time. He recognizes the different things outside of the books as well. He seems to know what different words look like, like his name or mama and dada He knows all his colors and can say most of them, he’s known them since around 17 months.

We have honestly really never tried spelling beyond singing the alphabet? So I showed him alphabet flashcards and he knew most of them, I have only done them out of order but he knew which one to bring to me if I asked for a certain letter. He’s trying to say the letter or say the sound for them.

He can identify circles and squares since those are the only two shapes we’ve thought to work on. And a big part of me feels so bad we haven’t thought to work on him with these things!

He has an early interventionist since he had a speech delay until 3 weeks ago apparently and she’s now very focused on the number thing based on her reports that we get after her visits. She’s been doing a lot of tests with him for numbers so far, she’ll likely start letters when I tell her he knows his alphabet letters as of.. last night. He didn’t show any understanding of them 5 days ago.

He had a hyper fixation on rolling cars for hours and she told us it was a yellow flag for autism but he had stopped 4 weeks ago so we thought it was something he needed to outgrow until all of this suddenly happened

I’m not sure if this is all typical and I’m just caught up in my anxiety, or overwhelmed from how much he suddenly seems to know in such a short period of time. Feel free to tell me I’m overthinking it if I am and this is just a typical range of development. Seriously all of this has happened in the last 8 days and my head is still whirling from how different everything is now.

Hi All, just looking for some advice and reassurance really!

My nearly 3 year old son is currently going through the motions of being assessed for autism but there is a 2 year wait! We are pretty sure he is, he stims, lines things up a lot, speech is delayed he can repeat words but doesn’t initiate words or really seem to have an understanding what they mean.

He is absolutely fixated on numbers and letters. He can do the alphabet and count to 100. Numbers are definitely his favourite, from the minute he wakes up he is counting, to the minute he goes to sleep.

He can read words but it’s like he starts to do something and gets good at it then will close the door on it completely and not do it again.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Is there anyway I can help support him to talk? I worry how he will cope as an adult I hope he doesn’t struggle too much, is there anyone else who is now an adult that had the same experiences growing up?

Thanks all ! Any advice would be appreciated.

Hey. I found this sub because I am having a hard time with people believing that I taught myself to read at age 2 and was reading chapter books at age 3 like Charlotte’s Web. I was reading everything in the house like my mom’s readers digest and she had to start hiding them from me because of the info I was picking up on. I remember using the newspapers and the comics to teach myself to read. People think I’m lying and I don’t get why it’s so hard to believe a child is capable of this? I was a very precocious child obsessed with learning new information and for my birthday my grandpa would give me Brain Quest flashcards and dictionaries. When I took aptitude tests as a teen, I was tested at a level of having already graduating college but I chose to go to high school instead of early college because I wanted to feel normal. I now have a son who is turning 2 at the end of the month, and he already knows the alphabet and how to count to 20. He reads books by himself and will talk to himself and make up stories to the pictures. I don’t think it’s that crazy to know that kids are capable of this.

Is this sub only for hyperlexic non-autistic people or can hyperlexic autistics join too? This may be a silly question, but I'm really unsure about this!

(I'm autistic and hyperlexic)

Edit: Okay then thanks for the downvotes.

Just fyi if your stance is that it requires being self taught (like what i read) then you're equally welcome to comment, i just altered the connotation of the title because when i asked with a different one on another subreddit a while ago i was met with answers that were obviously either people pleasing or off topic.

So I was scrolling through reddit and came across the following post from years ago from the subreddit r/AutismTranslated:

https://preview.redd.it/0xan5ieiqu9d1.png?width=988&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5ded9e7cda58e94ea00fa2ac645fbdb701a38d2

However, the person who made this post appears to have been met with, according to what I read, comments that are actually a myth.

https://preview.redd.it/hroselykqu9d1.png?width=1096&format=png&auto=webp&s=f220abaa5afd4ddee87ab5ef5de475bce394c133

Bear with me until the end please. I'm interested in this because Im interested in neurological traits, and I was taught to read at the age of 18 months (im also autistic, with an average WAIS IQ as of the age of 19, including an average Verbal Comprehension Index that's actually slightly lower than my FSIQ) using methods from the following book (mainly flashcards i believe), and I was typing "barneybabybopbarneybabybop" repeatedly on the computer before age 2 (as a side note, can someone help me understand why a toddler would do that?), i couldnt speak clearly until after I turned 2 so my mom said "that's (the typing) how i knew you knew how to read". However, the most valid sources i read online says that hyperlexia is only present when the ability to read is self-taught. According to ScienceDirect, "Hyperlexia is defined as the co-occurrence of advanced reading skills relative to comprehension skills or general intelligence, the early acquisition of reading skills without explicit teaching, and a strong orientation toward written material, generally in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder.". According to a government website, "Hyperlexia is defined as an early word reading skill in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder, along with an interest in written material, that is acquired without any explicit teaching and is superior to language comprehension and general cognitive level [15,16].".

If the definition "self-taught" is flawed, meaning it's absolutely almost *impossible* for a baby to read that young...then why are there so many sources out there showing methods to teach 2 year olds to read??? (such as here). Also, there's literally a popular book, the one used to teach me, with 13 million copies sold and a 4.6 star review, that claims babies can be taught even from birth how to read words with certain methods (including flashcards or something, however my dad did say no phonics were taught so maybe it wasn't truly "reading"). If it's definitely extremely rare (meaning people who claim that "it's a myth that toddlers can't learn to read given enough time, they can" arent correct) then why do there appear to be methods circulating around that seem to be working? Does anyone have studies on researchers attempting to *explicitly* teach kids between 1 and 3 years old how to read, along with maybe a "pass/fail" rate at the end?

I’ve got a 4 and a half year old who can read. He’s been reading since just after his 3rd birthday. At 18 months he seemed to know a most letter names and sounds (on a toy computer keyboard at a playgroup he stunned other parents by naming the letter and its sound).

We’ve not taught him, he’s had no formal instruction or anything. We’ve supported his interests but never explicitly taught any memorisation or decoding. His comprehension of what he’s read is great. He is also able to do addition and subtraction problems under 20.

However, he doesn’t seem to display any other signs commonly linked with hyperlexia. He has typical language skills of a 4-5 year old. He has social and emotional competency skills of a 6-8 year old. He doesn’t have any challenges with hyperactivity or inattentiveness. There is some neurodivergence in the family, but he is the most neurotypical (aside from these skills) of all of us.

Can anyone explain this to us? How he may have taught himself to read (and the other skills he has) with no explicit instruction?

I don't understand how you go from hyperlexic little kid to adult who is commenting and posting on reddit. Do you eventually just figure out how to communicate? I know there's speech therapy and other therapies but they aren't magicians. Please advise.