Autism or hyperlexia?

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I suspect there were some elements of hyperlexia as well as Asperger syndrome in me from a very early age, even before I started school and was a social, outgoing little girl. My mother said I was drawn to books practically since I was born and she joked that I could read when I was just learning to walk. I don't know if that's actually true, but I always did well in any subject requiring a lot of reading and picked up languages quickly. I had some of the indicators of both AS and hyperlexia, but not others. I was very verbal as a child and interacted with people.

See, I don't know if being drawn to reading has to be hyperlexia. I could read well before I went to school and so could my Son. We both just figured out how to read on our own. Why does that ability have to be medicalized. Why can't it just be appreciated as a talent rather than a disorder.

And just to add, when my Son was diagnosed at 12, he was in the top point 002% for verbal comprehension. I would have probably been around the same but wasn't tested as anything other than classical autism didn't exist when I was young. He is my carbon copy and we both have an affinity for languages. I really don't see it as a bad thing.

I don't think the OP is looking it as a negative. I think it is quite the opposite. She hopes it is hyperlexia without the autism.

I was one of those kids. I had no speech (no speech!) until age 5 1/2. But I could read (but not write).

I remember picking up "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss when I was 5 3/4, and reading it on the first go. With no instruction whatsoever.

I know, she wants a diagnosis that would make him more "normal". I was just making the point that just because a child is good at reading doesn't mean they have a disorder. I get sick of medicine wanting to label everything. This disorder, that disorder, everything's a disorder. It gets me down.

I don't think I've ever met a person who is completely without some sort of "pathology" somewhere.

The focus should really be about development of the child, not trying to make him/her more "normal." Hyperlexic, and many autistic children have superior reading and visual capabilities and can quickly learn things like social skills and life skills if teachers use written and visual materials to teach rather than verbal explanations.

Many child development experts focus too much on development of speech with these kids. The kids get frustrated because they don't understand. This frustration leads to behavior problems which the experts then try to correct with behavior modification therapies which of course are delivered verbally. I feel terribly for those kids.

The thing is, applying the term "hyperlexic" to a 4.5 years old that can type on computers nowadays is kind of out of place, when on YouTube you find babies that are reading at 3 months and typing at 2 years old. To me, the OP's case is not early: it's late. Knowing what I know today, if I could do it all over again, I would have started my children on reading and typing much earlier. To say it more blatantly, for a child on the spectrum, a neglect has been committed, already. And it has consequences.

Kids in strollers are able to play video games, even follow the instructions.

I am an SLP and I would encourage you, if you are still in the UK, to find a Hanen More Than Words class for parents ASAP. If you are moving outside of the UK, there are also classes around the world (although easiest to find in the UK and Canada).

I would not focus on the statistics presented by your SLT. I also wouldn't concentrate on teasing out hyperlexia from ASD. In my experience, children with hyperlexia are good at pattern recognition but don't understand much of what they are reading. Reading fluency is not the same as reading comprehension. It would be rare to find a child with superior reading comprehension and poor auditory comprehension -- I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not the standard case. A hyperlexic child without ASD would be developing broadly within expectations in other areas and also be an excellent reader.

Please focus on finding a knowledgeable SLT/SLP who has further education and experience in autism. If you can find a Hanen class, you will learn a play and relationship-based approach to increasing your son's social communication, which is incredibly important at this stage.

One has to be careful with this type of statements. I have heard all too many statements from speech pathologists that hyperlexia is a useless thing, and sometimes they go as far as to say it is detrimental to children's development. As if the verbal (oral/aural) communication is the only channel to true comprehension and intellectual development.

That is clearly not the case of, say, Helen Keller, right? Both of my children also learned to read way before they learned to talk. And I will add one personal story. When I was a teenager, I spoke three languages. My high school friends asked me one day, in what language I thought. I was startled by that question. Why would anyone need a language to think? I told them, no, I just "thought." I did not use any particular language to think. It was only later into my teenage years that I started to use verbal thinking. Only then did I come to understand what my friends meant. Another story from my daughter. When she was around 4 years old, I was driving her one day to school, and out of blue she said "cake is sweet." (Later on I found out the sentence was from a YouTube video.) Because of the lack of context, and because of all the noise in the car, and because she tended to use the same pronunciation for /w/ and /l/, I couldn't understand her. To make a long story short, after repeatedly not understanding what she was saying, she finally said: "sweet, S-W-E-E-T." That is, she spelled out the word for me. That would not be the normal way a child would say things. BUT, you have to take into account that for both of my children, written English was their first language. Spoken English was something they learned later. It was the way how they developed. And my daughter's reading skill today (9 years old) is surely above her age peers. The classroom teacher usually puts her in a different table during reading activities, so that my daughter could read more advanced materials. She is also fully social. You won't be able to tell she is on the spectrum (and will be for the rest of her life, like myself), unless you spend a long time with her. One more case: I have posted recently this picture in http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=347502:

This picture per se probably doesn't mean much to anyone. But, when you realize that out of around 85 people (all from the technology field), I was the only person that wrote down the sentence next to the drawings (not just a few words here and there), you can see that my entire thinking process is still largely visual.

My point is, there is more than just the verbal route to develop a child. Just because neurotypical children develop along the verbal route, doesn't mean that autistic children needs to follow that paradigm. Turning the life of autistic children upside down is not the way to go. Enough is enough. We've ruined enough children's lives already.

The thing is, because of the ill advices from people that just throw random opinions (often out of conflict of interest, a.k.a. "follow the money"), all too many parents have come to regard hyperlexia as a detrimental medical condition. I am not arguing that some children do get stuck at phonics and parsing of words/sentences without comprehension, but in those cases the fault is clearly on the side of adults. The adults are the ones suffering from mental illness: they cannot draw, and they cannot learn new skills. It's a very sad situation. Many adults paralyze at the mere thought of having to draw pictures. They have all but forgotten that they themselves were once upon a time little children and drew pictures without problems. If you look around, today's 7 year olds are already doing animation video editing. Yet most adults today are totally incapable of picking up this skill that any 7 year old can pick up. Instead of fixing these mental illness issues of adults, we prefer to lay the blame on the children. We blame the children for the shortcomings of adults. And that is the main issue with today's approach to autism: we have been treating the wrong patients.

the practise of keeping people uncertain has probably been around quite a while,
distrust yourself at all cost, and then you have just that

hyperlexia, the idea of another word, how exiting

the world's full of false victims, ofcourse they have it worse, they're not even a real victim, bring in the pedestals

http://www.andnextcomesl.com

My bible.