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Did anyone on here have a hyperlexic kid (learmed to read & talk simuntaneously)?

How did you recognise it at first? How did it play out?

DS clearly does not read, but sometimes seems to be doing something like basic reading. We've also been referred to SLP for lost speech milestones, and life is getting more than a little interesting. I'm just not sure which way is up right now... Haven't been on in a while, but can't get any useful advice elsewhere at the moment.

All the usual disclaimers apply.

-Mich

My DS learned to read and talk simultaneously, but I didn't think that was usually the full definition of hyperlexia? Online I see hyperlexia described as a condition in which the child is very good at written word recognition and yet has trouble understanding speech, for example - that definitely was not true for DS. He was late talking, but early understanding; he also never had excessive echolalia, which I see associated with hyperlexia online. I can write more about how early reading was for DS, but not sure if it's what you're looking for...?

I agree. DD was a very early reader, and combined with the fact that she wasn't a super early talker, I could certainly say that she learned both simultaneously, or nearly so. At 4, she can read any word that she understands (and can often decode words that she does not understand), but she clearly does not meet the ordinary definition of hyperlexia. She's very advanced in speech at this point (and probably always would have been but for a developmentally-appropriate difficulty articulating words); and she has no spectrumy behaviors at all.

I've heard hyperlexic children described as having the written word as their primary language. So if a child, for example, can't point to the cat when you say "cat," but can point to the cat when he or she sees the written word "cat," that child is clearly hyperlexic. The ability to read is inappropriately advanced given the child's receptive speech development. I'm no expert, though.

ETA: Rereading your post, it seems like you are in a pretty stressful place right now, so I'd like to give you a (((hug))). Do you want to describe more of what you are seeing? Or are you just looking for information about hyperlexia? I'll be honest; I did research hyperlexia a lot a while back (as a matter of curiosity), and I was very disappointed in the quality of the information available. It seems like a word without an agreed-upon definition, IMO.

Don't know if this is any help, but I had a little guy in my daycare who was diagnosed with hyperlexia - he did not talk at all (he was 3 at the time),but could spell and read three/four letter words. He was fascinated with the alphabet, especially magnetic letters. He did not seem to understand anything but simple commands, and if shown a picture he couldn't tell you what it was. Without the fascination with words and letters, he would have presented as a child with autism, but apparently the early reading made it hyperlexia ??

Mine (2e with Asperger's) approached all his milestones in scrambled fashion. He could count and do some mathematical manipulation before he could really talk; he learned to say the ABCs before "mom," "dad," etc. He was a very early reader (again, not sure how early because he was a fairly late talker).

I would say that if you have developmental concerns, talk with a developmental pediatrician. They can do a nice job teasing out what's just unusual and what's something that needs to be addressed.

DeeDee

Just to clarify, from what I have read hyperlexia is generally not considered to be its own thing. Rather, it is an autism-spectrum symptom.

As per usual, you guys are helpful, and quick

He also has extremely good receptive language, and matches what you guys are describing in your kids, and not so much a serious-disability-with-spoken-language kinda situation. That's kinda what I thought before the SLPs discredited (and failed to record accurately) all my responses to their questionere which would put him anywhere above age-levels on anything.

We're also reading a LOT, and starting to spell, which is -- odd. I heard someone on the subway behind us say "Oh, it's that kid again, the one who's always reading." And, yeah, he can count a bit. His favourite number is 2, and he will go way out of his way to point to pairs and say "two!"

Ok, I'll fish for a bit more advice, though I suspect these two will mostly only draw sympathy ;):

For some of the late talkers/eary understanders... did you get a lot of really complex/specific thoughts (Languagy throughts) communicated in gesture? I got "Mom, can we go sailing" the other day, in a combo of spelling, gesture, and pictographs, which was unique in that I could understand easily and verify clearly. Often it's more complex, and harder to 'get." (I said "yes" by the way, we're going next week -- what a convienient excuse ;)) If so: did you find anything that really worked to reduce the frustration levels around non-verbal communication. (I only worked in THIS field for 5 years, it seems like I shoudl have more idea of my own)

We have to be really pretty careful how we talk around him, because he understands virtually everything that's being _said_, but lacks the life experience to quite understand what it means & how it relates to other things. He got scared about "Jidism" one night, and we eventually sorted out that we'd been talking about circumcision... oops. I think once a day, I have to sit down, take a really, really deep breath, and attempt to probe the depths of a toddler's mind for *what* he overheard that scared him. He clearly listens to the radio when I have it on, too. (He's not really a frightfull boy, really quite brave, just that the world can be a bit confusing when you're 1 and trying to sort out the middle east... from when he was tiny we used to make a joke that when he made a certain face he was trying to come up with a solution for peace in the middle east. Oops.) I don't want to stop listening to the radio... I need my fix & I want him to grow up paying attention to the news and stuff, and I don't want to stop talking about things around him (for one thing, he never sleeps, we'd have to stop talking completely)

Thanks for the hug... I was more rushed than stressed, although I am a bit stressed & confused. We've been in a long "looks normal" period, but all of a sudden, we're getting a lot of comments again, and about half of them are about how smart he is, and half are about how odd he is. Getting referred to SLP was a bit of a shock, too, since the last time DS's development did EXACTLY the same thing with another 'milestone,' I tried to get it looked at and everyone told me I was crazy

I would not be shocked if he is somewhere on the spectrum, but I would be shocked if he has any serious disability from it. There's a family tradition of being high-functioning, and he's the antithesis of the typical AS toddler... well, mostly.

Hah! I wrote too much. He's a very sweet kid. It's almost like I *like* the guy It's aufully nice to be able to just say this stuff. I think I finish every other post here with some comment like this! I haven't even told his dad about the spelling yet (I almost didn't say it here).

-Mich

Thanks for the update! From what you say your little boy sounds pretty normal - for around here :-) I can certainly understand you being surprised you've got a referral to the SLPs given that he's still well under 2 - it's just not that unusual to not speak much at this age, and it doesn't sound as though there's anything wrong with his comprehension. What prompted it, do you know? FWIW, my DS still had fewer than 5 words in regular use at his checkup aged 22 months (I remember because there was a checkbox for that, and I couldn't tick it). Our health visitor, watching him at the appointment, said that if I was worried she'd refer him straight to the speech therapist, but actually she thought he'd have a language explosion very soon and she thought I should just get back in touch if he still wasn't talking in 6 months' time. She was right - I stopped recording his words when he reached 100 words around his 2nd birthday, and by two months after that, he was talking in 4-5 word sentences (and from then on his speech stayed ahead of rather than behind the average). It was amazing.

If yours is reading and spelling and you can tell, I guess he must be ahead of my DS in the speaking line! (We discovered DS could read a bit by accident when he was, what, 16m? - he got very excited at seeing "DVD" in writing - we went so far as to check that he could still read this, and his own name, in handwriting or other fonts than the standard trademark, but didn't explore much further at that age, so I don't know just how much he could read then.) Many of his first "words" were letters of the alphabet (he loved Starfall), and many were numbers. Once he started talking, he didn't look back (someone asked him today, "Do you ever stop talking?" come to think of it...). Some peculiar things I remember: years in which he would recite bits of his favourite books - especially funny at the point where he could talk in 4-5 word sentences, or in paragraphs from Thomas the Tank Engine. A phase a while later, when I'd think he was reciting from a book, but then would notice that he was changing the characters' names to fit the particular things he was playing with, or sticking bits of two stories together. He was using his favourite stories to scaffold his own language acquisition, and at the same time using his memory of the stories to guide his learning to read, I think. An utterly obsessed spelling phase around 2.5yo, in which we couldn't get through a whole minute without his asking "Mummy can you spell" whatever. This faded (and then for a couple of years he wasn't very interested in spelling as such - I think he was just checking his phonetic theory!) and then led into a phase in which he was desperate to learn to read properly - he'd try to read things he didn't know by heart, get a few words in, encounter a word that wasn't phonetically decodable and get frustrated. (At this point I bought him some phonetically based learn to read books, and the rest, as they say, is history.)

I don't actually remember a lot of language-y thoughts communicated in gesture. I think I'm pretty bad at interpreting gesture, though I do remember noticing that we didn't actually seem to have much trouble communicating and that I wasn't sure how it was actually happening! I'm sorry, this isn't much help. We half-heartedly tried sign language, but DS was never that interested (he was at nursery, and they didn't use it there, and we weren't that consistent about using it at home, so I guess he just never got enough exposure).

About the radio: IKWYM about needing one's own fix, but it's only quite recently (he's now 7) that I feel comfortable leaving it on with him around, and even now, I quite often regret it. I do quite often talk to him about what's on the news, but then I want to actually talk to him about it; I don't like the way the news gives you a few impassive sentences about things that can be very shocking and then it's on to the next topic. I really don't feel that adult-oriented news is appropriate for young children, personally.

ETA: we were on the look out for ASD, but have never seriously suspected it in DS. We were watching because I arguably meet the criteria for Asperger's and the same could be said for someone on DH's side of the family. DS has some over-excitabilities; it's possible that there's a relationship between this and his early literacy and his ASDish genetics/environment, but we've never seriously thought that he qualified for a diagnosis or that one would be any use to him; he's a geek, that's all :-)

We still have instances like that and DD's been early with speech. I think sometimes toddlers just don't find the need to express themselves verbally.

I can't remember if you said this before but have you introduced signing to your son? We figured DD had a good chance of being a late talker. DH didn't say a word until he was 2 and then he spoke in complete paragraphs according to MIL so we started signing pretty early on in case DD was the same. It turns out she was an early talker (although not as early as some here!) but signing was a wonderful bridge between the time that she was just saying a handful of words to when she started speaking more.

FWIW, we also looked into hyperlexia because DD has some sight words and she's also really into spelling. Just today she was asking me to spell more words with our alphabet magnets and creates her own words and asks me to pronounce them for her.

He has definitly lost some words (ok, a lot), but he's done that with ALL his major-ish milestones. He became completely immobile for about a month after walking distances infrequently from 7-10 mos. Then he started crawling again for, oh, a whole day or so, and then was walking full time.

We do sign with him, and he's been pulling signs out of his head from a full year ago and using them here and there, and making up a lot of his own (and a kinda cool grammar... simple, but effective enough to make his c. 5 'regular' signs pretty useful, combined with a lot of one-offs.) And he says a lot of words, he just doesn't repeat any particular one more than about once a week or so. Exactly the same as he did with walking.

Anyway, it was the lost words that got the referral, combined with only 2 'regular' words at 16 mos.

(around here 'regular' means "every day," I commented that I think DS's interests are too wide-ranging to encourage that kind of repetition, but they just looked at me like I had sprouted butterfly wings. I think they also didn't believe me about WHAT words come out of his mouth as one-offs.)

<shrug> We'll go to the appt when it comes up, take whatever they say with an appropriate serving of salt, and try our best to display whatever emotion they seem to be expecting. And meanwhile, I will continue doin' what I'm doin' (unless they suggest something cool)

Thanks guys

-Mich