Hyperlexia

[liv]

I've talked a few times before about being extremely hyperlexic, particularly as a child. I noticed that a lot of Twitter was suddenly talking about hyperlexia, and eventually realized it was related to an unfortunate incident where a guy who got ratioed for claiming he had made his children into super-geniuses by speaking to them using normal language rather than baby talk. Lots of people who actually know something about child pysch pointed out that he's completely wrong, and just got lucky that his children happen to be more than typically verbal - baby talk or standard language are equally good for children's language development. Lots of less serious people posted parodies going, I'm such a great parent, my child won three Nobel prizes before they even started kindergarten! It turned out that someone had made some exaggerated, parody claim about how early his children learned to read, and then apologized for inadvertently insulting people who are actually hyperlexic. Part of the reason that's a problem is because hyperlexia is a symptom of, or is commonly associated with, autism and related neurodivergences; mocking someone for making ridiculous claims about his parenting is one thing, but mocking autistic people is unkind.

Where I picked it up was a lot of conversation about how hyperlexia actually kind of sucks. Which made me reevaluate my experience of reading before I could walk and reading material intended for adults by the time I was seven or eight. There's overlap with the Gifted children discourse, certainly. As far as I know I am not autistic, but I learned to read younger than is usually supposed to be possible. As did my parents and most of my sibs. It's not clear whether hyperlexia still applies once you reach the age where you're expected to be able to read anyway, but I can tell you I read two to three times faster than what's taken as normal for native speakers with no specific learning difficulty, and my mother reads three times faster than I do – we timed her at some point.

So I suspect a large part of the reason I didn't find hyperlexia particularly troublesome is that my whole family is incredibly hyperlexic. Nobody had a problem believing I could read unreasonably young. Nobody tried to stop me reading everything I could get my hands on, or was particularly surprised when I repeated the age-inappropriate stuff I read. A lot of what people were reporting when the Twitter convo turned from mocking to serious was about not being believed, or being assumed to be showing off or otherwise obnoxious.

The other strand of, hey, hyperlexia sucks, it's not a super power, was about social difficulties. Of course, it's hard to disentangle from the way that lots of people, children and adults, are horrible to autistic kids anyway, the isolation might not be specific to reading skill. But people talked about how it was hard to make friends because they learned to use long words from books before they were old enough to grasp how to simplify their language so other, typically developing children could understand them. I don't think that was a problem for me; I mean, yes, I had a bigger vocabulary that most pre-school kids, but my experience of children that age is that you can put a bunch of kids together with no common language at all and they'll rub along somehow. I don't think any of the children who found me weird or even bullied me were bothered by my vocabulary. And I was never directly bullied for being a bookworm.

I did in some ways prefer the company of adults to children my own age. I think that was more because adults are prepared to make the effort to be polite, so you get a second chance even if you seem annoying on first impression. In as far as I did have social difficulties, it wasn't because my book-based vocabulary was mismatched to other kids', it was because I got accelerated in school. When I was five I was learning with the six-year-olds and sometimes even the seven-year-olds, and that's a big developmental gap at that age. And I wasn't particularly socially advanced, I think my social development was probably average or slightly below average. But a five-year-old who is reading books aimed at teenagers isn't necessarily a kid who can understand the social dynamics of a class of seven-year-olds. So I suppose that was an indirect consequence of hyperlexia; because I could read way ahead of my age expectations, I was considered gifted, and because my school in the 80s didn't really know what to do with gifted kids, I was dumped in a class with kids a lot older than me, and that helped with making classes less boring, but didn't really help socially.

When I was 8 or 9 hyperlexia was less of an issue because most children can read by that age anyway. And I was back with my own age group at that point. Most of the bullying I experienced at that age came from a teacher, and the other kids followed her lead a bit. Did she hate me because I was hyperlexic? It's possible; I'm pretty sure correcting her spelling and malapropisms didn't help. But I'm inclined to blame the adult professional in this situation for being horrible to 9yo me, rather than blaming my younger self for having too big a vocabulary.

I suppose the conclusion is, I was interested to learn that for some people, being hyperlexic had more down sides than advantages. I can see how it might have worked out like for me, but IME the main effect was that I got access to the whole range human knowledge a few years younger than I might have done otherwise, and that's almost entirely a positive.

Comments

[damerell]

My mother tells, with some glee, a story that she came to pick me up from kindergarten; the child-wrangler at the front was pointing to a poster and reading out "CLOSE DOORS AND WINDOWS". From the back of the room a voice pipes up "produced by the Department of the Environment".

I don't think it did me any harm, either.

[cjwatson]

I was reading a fair bit ahead of my age expectations as well - I probably only reached books aimed at teenagers when I was more like 7 than 5, but still. My school's response was in part to suggest that I be moved up a year, and my parents thought about it for a while and decided not to because of the likely social difficulties. In hindsight I think they were completely right about that for me since my social development was probably a fair bit below average for a lot of my childhood. OTOH I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if I'd had to put more effort into even my strong subjects earlier on rather than hitting my coasting-on-talent peak around the start of the third year of university ...

For me I guess it meant being able to learn some things in a partially or primarily self-taught way from very early on, which is just as well for the career I ended up choosing, though in the wider scheme of things it's a problem that excelling in that career is a lot easier for the self-taught since it skews things towards those with privileges that confer free time.

[meepettemu]

That’s interesting. I could read really early but my parents were told not to let me- they didn’t care for themselves but they wanted me to develop ‘normally’ so they followed the advice they were given. I’m seeing my mum tomorrow so will ask her more about it- it’s only ever really come up briefly!

[meepettemu]

Heh. I asked her and she confirmed what I said and that once in school I learnt to read super-fast and was well ahead of everyone else and she thinks I taught myself to read because I could read everything so early. So that was fun to learn! :)

[rosefox]

I have an Elmore Leonard novel autographed "to my youngest fan". He was quite surprised that the nine-year-old was dragging their adult to his book signing, rather than the other way around. But what else was I going to read? I'd already gone through all the children's books in my house, and it seemed an easy enough progression from Encyclopedia Brown to Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie to Lawrence Block and Elmore Leonard.

The thing no one around me quite understood was that being able to read the words didn't prepare one to comprehend the content. I wasn't taught to read critically—I just vacuumed up books indiscriminately, and never paused long enough to argue with them or DNF them or even think "Hm, not sure that's right". So I absorbed a lot of ideas that I then had to go back and dig out (looking at you, Robert A. "consensual incest between adults is not problematic in any way!" Heinlein) once I'd learned that not everything in books had to be taken as The Truth.

I went to a school for gifted kids and still managed to be an outcast, but that had far more to do with lacking everyone else's cultural referents.

[landofnowhere]

That's interesting! I was hyperlexic, but suspect that my other neurodivergences were much bigger issues socially -- in particular, that my speech was hard to understand. (Also homeschooled from age 9 onwards, which massively reduced the social issues).

[warriorsavant]

Never thought about hyperlexia being a "thing," or having a definition, where real or spurious. My sibs and I all read very early and quickly, AND had poor social skills. On the other hand, Hedgefund (my kindergarten-aged daughter) is an excellent reader, AND seems to have social skills, even be popular. (Where did we get her?)

[ambyr]

I was definitely not hyperlexic; in fact, I spent first grade in remedial reading, dutifully working my way through See Spot Run. Less than a year later, I was reading The Silmarillion. So the idea that early reading is equivalent to reading above grade level later in life is a bit puzzling to me, because that wasn’t my experience at all. But I do definitely share some of the feelings expressed by other commenters about encountering content I didn’t understand how to critically process.

[wychwood]

Haha, yes! I've been an obsessive reader most of my life, but I didn't *start* reading until I was at school and they were teaching everyone. Once I got it, I took off from a standing start and was reading Agatha Christie by the time I was 8 (not quite as dramatic as you!) and never really stopped again.

[lilacsigil]

I was hyperlexic - I know I could read basic words at age 2, because my dad injured his back and had to lie flat on his back for six weeks, as was the treatment then, and there's lots of photos of me sitting on his chest reading to him. My brother was not quite as hyperlexic but still a very early reader, and my youngest brother was a regular reader but vastly more social than either of his older siblings! My nephews (now 16 and 12) are also hyperlexic, but it's been interesting to see that current schooling was much more of the "give them extra things to do" variety rather than "separate them and make them do gifted education" variety. One of them is very introverted, the other one an extrovert.

[azurelunatic]

I mostly experienced it as a superpower but it didn't help me socially very much until I Found my People.

My peers were mostly very confused by me, and occasionally took advantage of the superpower. One of my fond memories of the class I called Bonehead English (I had low-achievement ADHD'd my way out of Accelerated English) was summarizing and explaining the previous day's Hamlet reading to the enthralled rest of the class before the teacher came in.

The other was in the unit on The Bible As Literature, when the substitute teacher asked us to list some common phrases that are allusions to the Bible. It's important to note that I had stopped pretending to be Christian at this point. So it was the rebellious Goth chick (someone I didn't really know, usually quiet) and the weird witchy chick (me) listing things off and the rest of class sitting like confused bricks. At one point in this exercise I made eye contact with the substitute and said, very deliberately, "Pearls before swine." She nearly cracked up laughing. So did my counterpart. The rest of the class was baffled.

[steorra]

That is a great story.

[lilysea]

I was hyperlexic -
only child,
house full of books,
no TV,
no kids my age within walking distance for most of my childhood,
incredibly neglectful/abusive parents who didn't want to spend any time with me if they could possibly help it.

I read everything that wasn't nailed down, age appropriate or no. At 7 I was reading adult nonfiction books about Christian Ministers in Hells Kitchen ministering to gangs and drug addicts in the 1970s. [My parents church had a help yourself, honour system, unsupervised lending library]

In fact, one of my parents cruellest punishments was banning me from reading anything for a day. I'd sneakily read the local paper and get caught out and then the ban would get extended...

I couldn't tell you how much being hyperlexic hurt my social skills -

I think the impact of the hyperlexia on my ability to get on with other children paled in comparison to the impact of my parents being
verbally abusive
emotionally abusive
severely neglectful and
physically abusive towards me,
which left me VERY ill-equipped to get along with other children.

Children could sense as soon as they met me that I was
different
weak
emotionally wounded
emotionally vulnerable
and it was like blood in the water to them...

[sfred]

I don't have a sense of what's a 'normal' age to start reading and what's unusually early. I'm also not sure actually how old I was, because my mum died years ago and that's not the sort of detail my dad remembers. I do know that I was frustrated when I started school that the older children got hymnbooks for Assembly but the first year infants were not expected to be able to read so didn't get books.

I know I skipped some levels of reading scheme books in the infant years of primary school, and I was in a fast/advanced readers group when I was 8ish, and got special dispensation in middle school (aged 9-13) to not write a whole page review of every book I read, because I was getting through a novel a day.

[mrissa]

I was moderately frustrated by how many people in that twitter discourse were taking for granted that "other kids will be unpleasant if you use words they don't know" was a fact of life rather than a thing other kids were ALSO being taught.

Many of the kids at my school were taught just that, that anyone who was better than you at anything should be hammered flat for it immediately. But one parent of a generally quite ordinary family of mostly little boys (their daughter was born when I was in grade school with all her older brothers) had taught his sons by the time I was in grade school with them that if a girl was better than you at something you liked, that meant she was a very SPECIAL girl and you should LIKE her because you could learn from her. And that boys who were better than you at something you liked were also friend material, because you could learn from them about the thing you liked too.

Somewhat heteronormative in its formulation, but it looks like chance made that part turn out okay for these specific boys--and it showed ME that the "shut up and don't know different stuff" parenting was a choice. Joey's dad was not an avid reader and all around nerd like my parents. What he was, was a nice person raising nice people. None of them turned out to be nerds, or champions of this or that or the other. They turned out to be people who didn't default to cutting others down.

The problem was never my hyperlexia. And having even one or two other kids in my class who knew that, even though they weren't like me, made all the difference.

[karen2205]

I understand hyperlexia as being able to decode words without understanding them, which is, I think, different from learning to read very early and having an intelligent child's understanding of what you were reading, which is necessarily incomplete, rather than no understanding at all. You probably wouldn't have bothered reading things if you knew you weren't understanding them.

Hyperlexia, as a word decoding problem, is a problem some children often with ASD have, where they look like they have good reading skills, but they don't, because they're decoding words without getting any meaning from the content. [and this isn't restricted to more complex skills of inference - a child who can decode "Molly ate a large slice of cake" but not answer the question "What did Molly eat?" is probably hyperlexic]

Learning to read early and getting into books/other written material [wondering a bit how the internet is changing children's reading material] when you're little is probably usually a positive thing, though for some children they'll need help to navigate this bit of being different from their peers socially.

[ethelmay]

That's also my understanding. https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=26503 says (my added emphases):

"Hyperlexia: The presence of advanced ability to read compared to the ability to understand spoken language.

"Children with hyperlexia have a precocious ability to read words, far above what would be expected at their chronological age or an intense fascination with letters or numbers; significant difficulty in understanding verbal language; and abnormal social skills, difficulty in socializing and interacting appropriately with people.

"Hyperlexia, according to some experts, may belong in the autistic spectrum along with autism and Asperger syndrome."

[sporky_rat]

I remember my first grade teacher coming up to my father at my brother's baseball game (her son was the same age) and raising all sorts of hell because I kept screwing up her lesson plans because I knew how to read and was well past the text book.
My father looked at her and told her 'Not my fault she got bored with See Spot Run at two, nor is my fault you can't handle a blip in your rather controlling lesson plans. Shall I send her to school with books to keep her out of your hair?'
She clammed up and left and I started to take Dad's science fiction to school. (That's when I read Nine Princes in Amber first.)

[jadislefeu]

I don't know if I am/was hyperlexic--I read early and well and fast, but my mom also read to me constantly from very young, so I wasn't exactly untaught, but I ran my preschool out of books and tested at a college reading level in third grade--but I definitely wouldn't trade it. The only thing I've ever really noted as a downside that's a side effect is related to my vocabulary--I have very little sense of what words other people don't know, even now, at nearly thirty. This is fine in conversation with anyone who doesn't mind asking me what I mean! But I actually started and then immediately abandoned a degree in technical writing because it very quickly became clear to me that I am not capable of writing clear and simple prose for a wide audience without a lot of blood sweat and tears. (And also feeling bad about myself for not being able to write accessibly--that's a negative side effect, I suppose, I see a lot of people talking about how long words and academic jargon are only ever used by people who want to feel superior and if you use them you're a snob and an asshole, which does not make me feel great when my word choice actually gets more obscure and arcane the more tired I am.)

I read faster than almost anyone I know--I think I've only ever met one person in meatspace that reads faster than I do. (And he leaves me in the dust.) But I enjoy that, because it lets me put words in my eyeballs as fast as possible!

[siderea]

A lot of what people were reporting when the Twitter convo turned from mocking to serious was about not being believed, or being assumed to be showing off or otherwise obnoxious.

This seems to be less about any condition of the young person in question, such as hyperlexia, than about run-ins with cultural anti-intellectualism. Were a lot of these Twitter people Americans?

I'm thinking about writing something about what the 80s were like, culturally, in the US, because they were pretty amazingly horrible, and one part of that was a wide-spread anti-intellectualism that saw being identified with books and reading as being contemptible to "normal" people. (This was also a thing in the UK, right?)

Hyperlexia is definitely going to be a social problem in those times and places there's prejudice against readers.

The other strand of, hey, hyperlexia sucks, it's not a super power, was about social difficulties. Of course, it's hard to disentangle from the way that lots of people, children and adults, are horrible to autistic kids anyway, the isolation might not be specific to reading skill. But people talked about how it was hard to make friends because they learned to use long words from books before they were old enough to grasp how to simplify their language so other, typically developing children could understand them.

So about this: this is codeswitching. It is literally learning to use different vocabularies in different social contexts. I remember keenly how in kindergarten I was abruptly confronted with the need to learn to codeswitch because I had vocabulary that was unacceptable to use outside my family, provoking strong negative reactions from both peers and adults.

It's odd to me that people are identifying this problem with reading. Sure, I picked up huge amounts of vocabulary from reading precociously, but also because I had conversations with my parents and watched the news on TV, and, heck, watched TV more generally. (It's funny how we identify precocious reading, but not precocious TV watching. There's a reason I remember all these news stories from the 70s.) The thing that made me a precocious reader also made me a precocious audience of all sorts. And, wow, is the world full of interesting vocabulary to absorb.

In any event: codeswitching. The thing that makes a kid good at absorbing vocabulary or precociously reading is a very different thing than that that makes a kid good at figuring out social rules about what words you get to use when. Indeed, I would theorize that there's multiple things you have to be able to manage to pull off codeswitching, and expecting, say, five-year-olds to have them all online in kindergarten is expecting too much, developmentally speaking.

I mean, I did pull it off, and evidently had at least a minimum of the all necessary skills, and I still remember how difficult and effortful it was, and how it pissed me off.