Your experience with hyperlexia

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Does anyone have it? Has it hindered you in any way that suspect? Tell me your thoughts on what it's like to have it.

I don't think I have it (having studied in more detail about it) but my friend suspects he does. He's trying to find someone who can diagnose him and give him the help he requires as a result, but there doesn't seem to be anyone in the UK that is easy to get to

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

I began reading before my third birthday. Before, really, I learned to talk. Reading has always made more sense to me than talking, and the way its mastery filled in for the things that weren't there in my life underpinned an enduring view of the world. A fallacious one, as things turned out, but one that carried me through it all.

I think I would have hyperlexia? I think I started reading at the average age people do, but I graduated almost instantly from picture books to novels. I remember sitting in class when I was 6 years old skim reading heavy 1950's editions of famous five books (in old style english, with no pictures), while other children sat with the teacher and read 3 sentence a page picture books one word at a time. From when I first started school I could just sit in the corner and read whatever I liked during reading sessions because I was so far advanced beyond what the other children were reading.

Yes. My parents taught me to read before Kindergarten, and on my second day of school I handed the reading textbook in to the teacher and asked for the next one. She didn't believe me, but was nice enough to check with my parents, who confirmed I was telling the truth and had finished it.

I had finished the assigned first story and looked up to see that everyone else in class was still reading, so I continued on, oblivious to the world and whatever the rest of the class did for the whole day.

I think I did, but I'm not sure. I was reading when I was 3. My mother said it was because my older brothers were learning to read and I wanted to be like them. But I don't think my comprehension matched up with it. I don't have records to prove this, but I can remember several instances where my lack of comprehension resulted in amusing stories for my mom to tell.

Learned to read at 2. Read fluently by 4.

Learned to read early and fluently. I know I was reading by four, so I was probably about three. My comprehension wasn't up to the same level, though.

Hyperlexia didn't have that much of an effect on me; my comprehension caught up with my reading ability around high school. What had more of an effect on me was how my teachers saw me thanks to the hyperlexia--they believed I was smarter than I actually was. Often times, people think you're very intelligent because you can use language well, either reading, writing, or speaking. I had a huge VIQ>PIQ gap as a child, and a smaller gap today.

So really, it wasn't reading early that caused problems; it was that people expected me to do everything else that well, too, and got angry at me because they thought I was "refusing" to do something I could "obviously" do perfectly well because I was "so smart". It didn't help that I was a gifted kid on top of it all, and good at school in general (which is what "gifted" means)--being years behind my peers in other areas wasn't even detected. After all, if your eleven-year-old is reading books bigger than her own head and trying to figure out what Einstein meant by "curved space-time", you don't really expect her to be incapable of brushing her own hair.

I learnt to read at 3 and I war reading complusively everything I saw; e.g., I was in the car with my parents and I couldn't help but read loud every sign there was on the street.

I remember reading way above my age level in grade school. Any hindrance would be because it allowed me to mask my other difficulties. I was 'precocious' and would respond in kind to queries that demonstrated my talent. But the other issues such as Theory of Mind deficits were unobserved and caused me no small amount of grief.

I’m not entirely sure of how early you have to grasp reading skills to be considered hyperlexic, but I know that I could read children’s books with ease by the time I went to pre-school at the age of four, and that I could read novels aimed at older children by the time I was five or six. I was also a self-taught reader.

My profile did match that of the hyperlexic child in some ways, in that various reading tests I took revealed quite a gap between reading comprehension and actual word-reading ability. In addition to this, I had the typically hyperlexic quirk of an early fascination with letters.

My hyperlexia, if you’d call it that, didn’t really affect the course of my childhood in any way, spare a great deal of boredom and frustration during reading lessons...

I had the hyperlexia. I taught myself to read by three years of age. My reading ability was tested at university level when I was in the first grade, but I did not understand the majority of what I was able to read. I am not sure precisely where my comprehension was, but it was probably above my grade level - nowhere near what I could read, though.

I found myself using a lot of words and phrases I read in books in conversations without always knowing what they meant (in another thread I mentioned calling my sister a "traitorous b***h," which I had read somewhere, and knew it was something you said if you were upset at someone...I had no idea what it meant).

I started off by reading books about Greek and Norse mythology early on, and then moved on to all kinds of novels, which I would read over and over and over and over and over again. I was generally more interested in reading books than talking to people, being around people doing things with people, or even acknowledging that other people existed.

I identify a lot with what Callista said, especially with the: