Does anyone else read like this?

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A few nights ago I was talking to my boyfriend and trying to explain to him the different ways that autistic people can experience or do things in relation to sensory issues, and he asked if autistic people read differently than neurotypical people. I think I read in a fairly average way (one word at a time) and haven't heard of any reading differences in people on the spectrum, but I thought I'd ask here.

He's got quite a few spectrum-y characteristics, and said that the way he reads is that he looks at a line without reading it, moves to the next line, and while he's looking at the next line he reads the image of the previous line in his head. He's said he doesn't think it's photographic memory, because he can't go look back at the picture of the line later to read it.

Does anyone else read in a way similar to that?

I don't know if this is related to AS or not. I'm one of those people who learned to read effortlessly, without a "sounding out the words" phase. I call it "the reading gene", because my mother and my own children are/were like this as well. When I read your post, "A few nights ago" comes to me in one block, immediately. Then "I was talking to my boyfriend", again, comes immediately. I don't read one word at a time. Never have. I used to wonder, in my early schooling, why kids would always read each word as a separate entity while reading aloud, because when we talk, the sounds of the separate words usually blend into each other.

I don't know about reading the image of the previous line in my head, though. I'm keeping it in my head somehow, but not in a visual way. I'm not really sure, to tell the truth. I do find that reading Charles Dickens can be a bit difficult, because his sentences go on and on, and I have to keep going back to remind myself who or what he started talking about.

I tend to read with phrases... I was also one of those children that didn't have to sound out letters to be able to read. I was reading at 4 i think. I'm also a very visual reader, I am able to picture what it is being read in my head. I am also a fairly slow reader though, an old professor of mine actually suggested that I get tested for a reading disability. I think it mostly has to do with the sensory processing issues I have. I need to be in complete silence and sometimes the words blur on me.

I'm not really sure. I think I kind of use the "buffer and process" technique. I never had a problem with reading, and was always a very fast reader and way above my grade level (I was reading 8th grade books in 2nd grade).

Interesting. I've never thought about how I read before, but I do know I often process conversation that way... decipher the tape after the fact. It only works for a short span of conversation, but if I'm at all distracted by something else, I refer back to the tape and in that way keep up with the conversation.

I think this is a function of the filmographic memory... different from photographic. Our heads are full of 'film clips', which is the way we process things. Some get filed permanently and some don't.

I do read by phrases, I'm pretty sure.

How my reading process works is something I thought about, but I have not figured out.

First impressions seems that I read the words in high speed and make other sentences with it for my memory, like a translation. But the mechanics around it...

That translation-thing could be because I am raised bilingual (Frisian / Dutch).

this spounds more like dyspraxia to me... but I'm not profesional... and I also know that it's dificult to diferentiate both.

www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk: adult sympthoms

My personal observation: Reading and relating to the world through text discussion (like this forum...) is probably my true AS obsession.

I do not visualize things at all, not sentences, not pictures. So I know that makes me opposite of many Aspies.

I skim read / speed-read. My reading comprehension is off the scale. In school it used to literally be 99% and in math - story problems were my favorite when all the other kids hated them. I found terse x, y, z math problems confusing and difficult. I would get confused on what was what... vs. story problems, it was always very clear to me (this train is going to Seattle at 60MPH and...).

I read word by word and only recently have started wondering if I read differently in comparison to everyone else. I read at 194 WPM, which 6 words less than the minimum average(average is 200-250 WPM), so I technically have basic reading skills. My comprehension rate, however, is above that of someone who reads at 1,000 WPM, with the typical comprehension rate at that level being 85%. On average, @ 200-250 WPM the comprehension rate is 60%. I have a comprehension rate of 91%. So I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong/different.
EMZ=]

I have only 2 reading speeds--very slow or very fast. When I'm skim reading, I do it similar to your boyfriend. I don't always read straight forward, and I use something like your boyfriend's method with paragraphs, and even clusters of paragraphs....as well as line by line the way you described.

My very limited photographic memory serves me well in that I mentally catalog important points, and when they need to be relocated I know exactly where a certain point is positioned on the page, whether left or right side, and approximately where that page is, in the book or document. Sometimes I can recall nearly exact wording too but this is definitely not genuine photographic memory.

I only discovered my technique, which sounds very similar to the way your boyfriend reads, when I started doing online research and processing through massive amounts of information. Also if the content is presented in a tedious fashion, or if it is too complex--I won't waste much time and effort reading the material.

If I'm not interested in a topic, it's impossible to multitask as I have trouble with even one task, and it therefore requires all my concentration. But if I'm extremely interested in the subject matter, it's quite effortless to multitask as well as multilevel. I have a theory that this is the way the majority of us on the spectrum function, with only slight variations in terms of specific technique. We don't process information linearly, but from a multi-leveled perspective--in which many different levels are considered and processed simultaneously. And if we're not interested in it to begin with---there's not going to be much processing at all, because it's not worth the effort.

Yeah I read in blocks too. Gosh, if I were to read word by word I'd never get through as many books as I do. No wonder my mum was surprised that I read 30 pages of a book not long after I just bought it. To me that's reading really slowly.

My mind doesn't process blocks and phrases. It's either one word at a time or rapid imaging.

When I read, and I start to really get into it, I don't see the words anymore, I only see the scenes acted out in my head.

Which is probably why I have so much trouble reading history books and things like that...I can't exactly picture "In 1882 they signed a document. Then they went to war." without a lot of effort.

I guess that makes me very visually oriented...even though it's text??? I don't know.

I do the same thing, which comes in handy when I need to recall things to share with others. I don't know though, maybe it's a normal thing, you're the first person I've heard mention it.

I don't read like that, but sometimes I'll skip ahead a paragraph or two and read that first before going back and reading the part in between.

Ooh, but DonkeyBuster's thing is true for me.