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    Joined: Apr 2016
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    I posted about my daughter here but now I have a question about my son.

    He was born reading. I don't know exactly when he learned to read. All I know is when he started talking, we realized that he was able to read too. Not just reading, but counting, naming complex shapes, colors etc. He was also diagnosed with PDD-NOS due to his sensory issues and speech delay, but I believe his hyperlexia was a big part of his dx, because of how unusual it was and because there was a distinct difference between his receptive and expressive speech and his decoding ability.

    Studies suggest that this isn't a true giftedness and this decoding ability of his is a disability, instead of a superability and testing IQ in these children before the age of 10 isn't recommended because the research shows that the reading ability doesn't continue to advance at the same rate as in the typical children and by the age of 10, the reading advantage is completely gone (Yale). Anecdotaly, the verbal and visual spatial IQ of these children can change dramatically over the years, not because the hyperlexic child gets less intelligent, but because typical children's verbal and visual abilities catch up and get ahead.

    After five years of therapy his PDD-NOS dx was removed, based on ADOS, and now at 7, he looks like an NT kid with some weird interests and oversensitive nature. He is 7 now and just finished the 1st grade. So far he does great in all areas, but I just don't know if this is going to stay like that.

    If you have a hyperlexic child, what has your experience been like? Can you be hyperlexic and truly gifted? He was never tested and knowing that his IQ may not be stable I just don't want to do it yet.

    Last edited by Chicagomom; 07/01/16 12:38 PM.
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    Sent you a PM, Chicagomom.

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    I thought this was an interesting article. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...sorder-hyperlexia-and-einstein-syndrome/ DS9 seems to fit into category 3. He was reading at a third grade level in early kindergarten and he still tests about 3-4 grade levels ahead on reading achievement tests. He tests 98-99th percentile on MAP. Cognitive ability testing also 98th-99th percentile. DD was an early reader as well but in the last several years it has been challenging to get her to read at home so her achievement scores are slipping. She would probably be category 1 (if I had to pick a category) however I think there should be another category, one where children are gifted, the other kids do not catch up, and they don't have autistic traits. There is research stating that most highly gifted kids were early readers. So are they really hyperlexic? Or just gifted?

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    Originally Posted by Chicagomom
    If you have a hyperlexic child, what your experience has been like? Can you be hyperlexic and truly gifted?

    Often gifted/ASD children look hyperlexic because no one can believe they are comprehending at so young an age. (True hyperlexia is early decoding without comprehension.)

    The gifted/ASD may have the very early decoding, *but be reading with comprehension*-- in which case they're not hyperlexic.

    The gifted/ASD combination is unusual enough that many providers won't catch it early, and mistake the gifted reading for hyperlexia.

    I don't see why gifted/hyperlexia would be impossible-- I would just bet that hyperlexia is overdiagnosed in the ASD population.

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    The article I posted doesn't really make that clear--that hyperlexia is reading without comprehension. I think in a really young kid, esp. one w/ expressive speech delays, it can be hard to know if they are comprehending. So maybe your DS was actually not hyperlexic. He does sound very similar to my DS and all I can tell you is that his reading has stayed advanced at age 9. I think he had very early reading ability and he was an excellent decoder, but he was never truly hyperlexic.

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    I have a 16 yo who might have been diagnosed as hyperlexia had we pursued it. She was obsessed with the written word by age about 12 months and reading ability really took off by her 2nd birthday. She was not an early talker, so much of her spoken language development occurred in parallel with reading. By the time she was 4yo, she no longer wanted dh or I to read aloud to her because she could read much faster on her own. She had some other unusual qualities that could raise flags for ASD (extreme stranger anxiety as a baby/toddler, did not speak her first year at preschool,…). For reasons that may not have been entirely rational, we were not keen on pursuing a diagnosis - in any case, it would certainly have been a "high functioning" diagnosis.

    But the main thing I wanted to convey is that our experience is another example showing it is possible to be an early reader without hyperlexia. It was clear to us as parents from the start that her reading comprehension was strong, and throughout school she was always off the charts on standardized testing for reading (she took her first SRI Lexile test in 3rd grade and her score was above the college range).

    Our approach in the early years was to embrace the joy she found in reading. We put a lot of time and effort into finding/procuring books in line with her interests. Many, many, many books. Today she is an extremely capable hs student (in all subjects). In her case, early reading was a sign of unusually strong cognitive ability that has persisted through the years, judging from hs grades and a recent ACT test.

    Last edited by amylou; 07/01/16 07:33 AM.
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    You might be interested in this older thread:
    http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/162404/Re_Hyperlexia.html

    As a 2-year-old reader with a son who was a 2-year-old reader, and someone who's spent lots of time reading hyperlexia and autism research... I believe the research isn't good enough to tell us parents what to expect for our particular children. Anything is possible.

    Hyperlexia has maybe dozens of studies at most, mostly with tiny sample size. The hyperlexia studies don't even agree on a common definition of "hyperlexia."

    If your child is doing great at age 7 (my son is about that age too for what it's worth) he'll probably keep doing well, surely? But it's more useful to look at kids individually than to rely on categories like autism and hyperlexia.

    My interpretation when some of those papers say the other kids catch up is that there's a kind of plateau where reading skills are as good as it's useful for them to be, and at that point kids switch from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." This doesn't mean that hyperlexic kids regress, or that they can't also be good at "reading to learn," it's just that being advanced at reading stops distinguishing them once other kids make it up to the plateau too. At that point, other traits matter more than reading ability.

    My son was also a 2-year-old fluent reader (1-year-old beginning reader), lots of social and sensory kind of issues, and he's doing very well now in 1st grade. He had a decoding-vs-comprehension gap for a while but in his case I think it was mostly because preschoolers don't understand the world. His comprehension is good now that he's older. He had an IQ test as part of a school assessment at age 3 and he was very good at the nonverbal (block design) part but had trouble with the verbal part. These days he's quite advanced in math as well as reading. He isn't a social butterfly but seems happy.

    FWIW I was a 2-year-old reader carrying around toy letters all the time and the whole deal. I've had a lot of social trouble/disinterest throughout life, but was always very good at school-type things and went to a bunch of gifted enrichment stuff. As an adult I am a happy and well-adjusted person. But I expect my parents were pretty worried about me sometimes as a child and every part of school besides the academic work was an ordeal for me.

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    For some context: Phonetic decoding skills pretty much max out late in middle school. NT readers make the learning-to-read/reading-to-learn transition usually during fourth grade, which is generally when we denominate them fluent readers. So yes, NT readers do "catch up" to very early readers, if we are discussing only phonetic decoding skills.

    Comprehension, vocabulary development, and content knowledge are another discussion.

    Much depends on the definition of hyperlexia, and whether it specifically excludes high-level reading comprehension.


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    Chicagomom I don't have answers but I have the same questions about my son who is nearly 6. He got an autism dx very young (18 months) and more recently the paed added adhd and he started ritalin. He had an iq test at 5.0 before starting school (SBV) and had a quite a spikey profile (131 for verbal, 122 for performance, but quite a spread with the highest score of 144 for fluid reasoning, lowest at 111 for knowledge - 128 overall, but of course he is very young.). On the Celf language assessment around the same time he had no scores below 50th centile and half his scores were above the 90th centile... but on the 'bus test' (narrative retell) he did score a bit delayed. Hyperlexia wasn't so much on my radar before school started. He wasn't a self-taught reader, he learned to read at 4 through Reading Eggs (completed the program). He started kindy this year in a mainstream school with an aid. His teacher was impressed with initial reading assessment and thought comprehension was quite strong (he has had weekly speech therapy for years, and he had a few years of aba therapy too). They started him on high level readers (equivalent of about 7.5 then jumped up levels to equivalent of about 9 very very quickly. His decoding skills seem unlimited but his comprehension has not kept up I don't think and I do think I need to address this early next term and say we go back down at least 10 levels). t's very variable based on the reader but I do think i can see hyperlexia now at times (quite fluent word reading when fluent comprehension is missing) and if i look at his early development i can definitely see elements of it (the asd obviously, the very strong memory for things like flash cards, shapes, colours, letters, numbers etc all of which he could remember almost on one showing). His biggest weaknesses these days in terms of asd are social (he is very verbal and responsive but definitely struggles with the complex social elements of communication stiill, especially with peers). Like you I wonder about what his type of profile will look like as he gets older... we are currently using this resource on advice from a speechy and I do think it's been helpful https://www.redshelf.com/book/14625...johnson-carolyn-logiudice-and-jane-orman

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    Is there a good test of comprehension for 6 year olds apart from language assessments like Celf?

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