Hyperlexia
Feb. 17th, 2020 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI'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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-18 12:14 am (UTC)