Any other type 3 hyperlexics out there?

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The thing is, you actually know how you learned to read. I should search if that could even be classified as hyperlexia, given that you taught yourself to read without the help of a teacher.
I can't even say 'I taught myself to read' because I don't know how I learned to read or who taught me. In fact, I just remember reading.
I had always thought it was my parents who taught me to read. Until one day, about 8 or 9 years ago, my mom told me how my teacher (when I was three) told her that I could read. I didn't even suspect I could be on the spectrum at the time, so I didn't believe that I could have learned how to read by myself. Until my mom told me that I could possibly have AS. That is when I found out about hyperlexia, and I started believing that it was possible for me to have learned to read with nobody teaching me.
Any similar experiences, anyone?
I think it would be really interesting if scientists researched more about hyperlexia, because, in my opinion, it is a gift; if a child is found out to be hyperlexic, their potential can be used for the benefit of society, and not wasted without any use, like mine...

I actually didn't know how I learned to read when I was a kid, because I was hardly able to form episodic (autobiographic) memories at the time I learned. I only pieced it together from the stories my mother told me. The alphabet story was a long-time family legend, but it was only a few years ago that I heard the encyclopedia story and thus had an explanation for how I figured out how the letters formed words, whereas my siblings, who were exposed to just as much Sesame Street as I was and one of whom the alphabet flash cards were actually intended for, didn't learn to read words until first grade.

Definitions of hyperlexia I've found on the internet vary, from requiring that reading ability far outpace comprehension ability and that it definitely has to come with autistic-spectrum traits, to considering any kind of precocious reading as a form of hyperlexia (as this Treffert does) but noting that it may come with, without, or with mild and temporary autism traits.

In any case, whether whatever was going on with me can properly be called hyperlexia or not, the discovery that there are kids out there who learn to read early with little to no training and have Asperger-like symptoms that they outgrow seems like it could solve the mystery, which I've consciously pondered from time to time since I was at least a pre-teen, of how I could seem to be so weird and struggle to fit in when young, yet not have any obvious and definable thing "wrong" with me. A developmental history that sounds a lot like mine (if a bit more extreme) is no longer unheard-of. My family can be right that I showed a lot of autistic traits when younger, and yet I can be right that I am definitely not on the spectrum now.

The original explanation for it all, I think, was that I was just very smart, and sometimes very smart people were weird and socially awkward. But that explanation lost credibility in my late teens and early 20s, when I found out that my old psych evaluation from childhood put me with a non-gifted IQ, several of my same-age peers outscored me on standardized tests, and my own sisters outscored me on standardized tests in English. I wasn't that much smarter than my sisters and my peers after all. So it makes sense that I had a somewhat quirky distribution of my talents, leaning me toward being precocious at "left-brain" stuff like factoids, the systematics of language (grammar, spelling, mechanics, phonics), and science, and a bit slow at social and emotional stuff.

Last edited by GhostsInTheWallpaper on 28 May 2016, 9:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.

never heard of it until recent.
I was able to go through thesaurus for my dad (a writer) and read novellas in Reader's Digest at age 3.

I suspect he assisted in my reading tho.
I started early and skipped grades because of his tutoring. Even when I had to repeat 7th grade I still graduated the year I turned 16.

I had trouble with that SRA thing, too! Never heard anyone else talk about it before.