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6:30pm June 5, 2014
Anonymous asked: Hi, in a recent post you mentioned your hyperlexia and described it as "good decoding, awful comprehension" - could you explain this in more detail please? Is it like, knowing what individual words mean but not being able to figure out what a sentence means?

Hyperlexia is a learning disability, kind of like dyslexia is.  Except with hyperlexia, you have what looks like a really good thing, normally:  Very early reading.  The trouble is that at least with the classic kind of hyperlexia (which I seem to have), what you have especially in young kids is that they can “decode” the words, but have trouble understanding both the written and the spoken word.  Decoding is the ability to look at a word and know how it sounds.  So like, when I was a little kid I could pick up a book and read it out loud, at least once I learned to talk.  But it didn’t mean I could necessarily understand a word of what I read.  Because comprehending the meaning of the words is a different cognitive skill than comprehending the pronunciation of the written word.

Now, of course, I do understand the meaning of words.  But it’s not easy and natural.  If I don’t work hard at it, then listening to someone talk just sounds like gibberish sounds, and looking at words I may be able to make out the sounds but there’s no meaning attached.  I have to work harder to attach the meaning to the words.  

And that’s why, even though hyperlexia is associated with either reading very early, or self-taught reading, or both, it’s still considered a learning disability.  Because it usually goes with some amount of language comprehension problems, or other language and social problems.

Like a hyperlexic kid (at least, a kid with the kind of hyperlexia I had) will see the letters “DOG”, read the word “DOG” out loud, but they won’t form in their head any ideas about dogs.  Or as we get older, we’ll be able to read at higher and higher levels, and comprehend at higher and higher levels, but our ability to “decode” written words (go from written to spoken) will always be higher than our ability to understand them.

In my case hyperlexia also went with something that’s pretty common in hyperlexic autistic kids (and hyperlexia and autism go together a lot, to the point they’ve had to identify subtypes of hyperlexia that involve autism and others that don’t), which is that my ability to use language was ahead of my ability to understand it.  In other words, expressive language was better than comprehension.  I could use bigger words than I could understand, for instance.  Still can.  I can write articles that I can’t read.  I once measured my vocabulary, both my vocabulary in terms of words I can use appropriately, and my vocabulary in terms of words I could understand, and at my absolute best I think I only understood about 3 out of 5 words I could use.  But it’s more than just vocabulary sizes, it’s also that it’s easier for me to write something than it is for me to read or to listen to words.  And there are also complicated effects of growing up with expression ahead of comprehension that are hard to explain and could take all night.

But that’s just my version of hyperlexia.  It’s sort of a version you’ll often hear described – decoding better than comprehension, expressive language better than receptive language, learns language through heavy echolalia and use of rote learning.  But it’s not the only sort of hyperlexia there is.  There are hyperlexic people who have much better comprehension than I did, and who mainly just read early but have a few other language or social issues.  But sometimes you’ll hear hyperlexia just described as “early reading” or “self-taught reading” and wonder “why is that a learning disability?” and it’s because often it comes with language and social skills issues.  Sometimes it even comes with issues like you’d see in dyslexia, aside from the decoding part.

Notes:
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  5. munnarita said: and i have issues with comprehension of writing sometimes, its episodic, i always used to call it “forgetting how to read” and found it so hard to explain why i could still… read! but now i have the word “coding” - thank you :)
  6. munnarita said: that was so interesting!! we have a family friend who is hyperlexic (and clearly autistic but apparently im the only person who knows that) and i have memories of her as a very young child reading out ingredients lists and stuff
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