Hyperlexia is defined as learning to read prior to the age of five without any training in learning to read. Basically, it’s when a child teaches themselves to read before they are five years old.
-Sabrina
I think my kid did this? My mother taught him his letters, I taught him what sounds they make, and then he could read within the week.
I 100% did this. My mother thought I’d just memorized my favorite stories word-for-word until she brought home a new one and I’d somehow already “memorized” it.
Ok so how does this work?
I mean a kid in a room full of books cannot spontaneously learn how to sound out the letters, right?
So what does ‘teaching yourself to read’ mean?
Is it learning to read by listening to others read to you? Isn’t that how all kids learn to read?
I’m confused…
Okay, I’d like to point out that I was a whole four years old at the time and my memories are shaky to the point of nonexistence, but I think it has a lot to do with learning to read by listening to others read to you when they are not making any great effort to teach you. You simply sit there, looking at the text and listening to them, and with a basic knowledge of what sounds are associated with which shapes on the page, you work out which group of shapes associates with which group of sounds, and boom, you know this word, and that word, and that other word, and I was able to spell “euoplocephalus” in kindergarten.
It can also manifest as being taught the basic sounds the letters make, without teaching how to construct them into words. Most children also need to be explicitly taught how to string those together into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and then how to read.
Every child will do this to some degree.
What marks hyperlexia is that this process can take weeks instead of years, and that complex language is involved. A five year old reading a book written for a five year old is not remarkable. A five year old reading a YA novel to themselves is.
It is as much about complex reading as it is about basic skills.
*is still salty about being told he couldn’t read Lord of the Rings from the book bus when he was eight*
^ this bullshit right here is why I stopped reading ADULT fiction at age 6, and literally did not read another book outside of assigned school work until I was thirteen or fourteen.
Same. I had a reading level way beyond the average for my age, probably because the first books I read were scientific nonfiction about dinosaurs, since that was my special interest.
My teachers weren’t very encouraging at all, which I don’t understand. Surely teachers should be happy about students going beyond expectations…
I’m pretty sure I had this to some degree, and to some extent this was a feature of much of my early life – I even mostly skipped the Young Adult section and went straight onto adult fiction sometime round 13/14.
There should definitely be more linguistic investigation into this phenomenon because there’s probably more to this than meets the eye. For example my mother distinctly remembers me not responding to phonics because I learned words “by remembering the shape”, not by individual letters, which often led to mispronunciations like
[oʊˈʃiːniə]for “Oceania” and
[ɹɪˈt͡ʃɛliju]for “Richelieu” (this was before I had any handle of French orthography”.
I was a bit slow in getting into books of just words and not pictures because I loved the exquisitely drawn and illustrated picture books that made up children’s books. My most favorite was Dinotopia by James Gurney that I’d read and re-read all the dang time! Just to look at the pictures and see all the details in it for what seemed like hours.
It wasn’t until I was around 9 that I got into Harry Potter and because it had the little illustrations before each chapter that I finally made my move into not-illustrated books, so I’m thankful for Harry Potter for helping me see the wonder of making up things in my mind instead.
I’m very much an artsy and artistic child (and now adult) that is very visually oriented, especially since I’m deaf and hard of hearing (born that way). Sounds doesn’t come as easy as images to me. But I was an avid reader and often learned the shape and spelling of the world (while making guesses as to the sound) from the books I read and therefore mispronounced it later on. And I mcfucking loved science and animal documentaries where I learned a lot of high up words from that and what they meant, and higher concepts as well.
I was slow to talk due to my hard of hearing and needing hearing aids close to when I was 3 to help me hear enough to talk and copy it. But I was definitely bright enough to start organizing things into shapes, categories, and inherent functions even before then. I think if I had been hearing from birth, I might’ve jumped into reading very very early with minimum of help.
Even for a hard of hearing person, I was tested to have unusual reading comprehension that was often missed (apparently) by other hard of hearing people, and my math comprehension was stellar even if my math computation was just average. Thanks to being explicitly taught sarcasm and idioms, metaphors and similes, I’m very adept at them by now but I remember there was a time I wasn’t and had to be told and educated what they were because I couldn’t just learn it from overhearing and eavesdropping like hearing people could.
So whatever studies people might do about those who have hyperlexia, don’t forget the intersectionality of disabilities and race and class (those whose parents are poor and can barely spend time with their children are much less likely to be read to than those who have comfortable incomes) that might make a child who would’ve been hyperlexic show that only later once they get access to the same resources that privileged white, able-bodied, neurotypical, and comfortable income children had from birth.
Those intersectionalities have more of an impact than you’d think.
It took me one reading lesson at age 6 in school and then I just knew how to read. I read adult books and kids books without distinguishing between the two. Nobody ever tried to stop me and I’m kinda weirded out by all the focus on “reading level” when it comes to picking books for children and even teens
My difficulty now is I have a 5 year old who is currently being taught at school and I’m a bit stomped on how to help her learn because to me it was just those letters sound like this and the sounds just naturally form into words and I’m not sure how to make it click as easily for her.
Ooh, yay, the thing has a name!
My parents realized I could read as a very young child when I told them “look mommy, that NO SMOKING sign is missing a K!”
I don’t remember learning to read at any time in my life. I just knew.
From the hyperlexia Wikipedia page:
> Some hyperlexic children learn to spell long words (such as “elephant”) before they are two years old
I’m delighted that they used that particular example, because my own “holy shit this kid can spell” word? Pachyderm. Still have no idea where or how I heard that.
I remember teaching myself to read at three or four by watching Sleeping Beauty over and over and comparing it to my Golden Book edition thereof. A year later I was reading Harry Potter. I don’t remember a specific age at which I graduated to “adult” books, probably because my taste in literature was and still is profoundly random. I just kind of… grab books off a shelf and see if I like them. I do remember reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc at nine.
My parents figured out I could read at 22 months. This was about the time I really started speaking, so there’s a good chance I could read before I could speak. And, yes, that’s before 2 years old. That’s not a typo.
I used to amaze people reading labels at the grocery store at like 2 & 3 years old.
I can’t remember a time I couldn’t read. (However, I had that experience (not being able to read what’s around you anywhere) when I was 17 and in small-town Poland and didn’t know any Polish. It was different and a little unnerving.)
One of the problems with growing up hyperlexic is that it’s such a source of praise and amazement from the adults that once you’re of the age where everyone’s expected to read, you lose that praise and adulation and it hurts. It’s like you were amazing and special and now you’re suddenly not anymore.
Also, the problem of your reading level being (way, in my case) above your social developmental level means you’re stuck reading books below your reading level but at your social level, or if you want to read at your reading level, you might be exposed to things inappropriate for you that you can’t handle or understand yet. (I’ve long thought there should be a press for hyperlexic children that publishes books at various reading levels with various social levels so hyperlexic children have appropriate books to read that still challenge them.)
Re: indi-flying-with-dragons
comment – my spouse didn’t read until
he was around eight years old, when his special-ed teacher figured out he had a
lazy eye and couldn’t see the words in focus. Once that was treated, he went
from not-reading to reading-at-a-college-level within a few months.
Mooncustafer 