AUTISM THERAPY
Better Understanding Hyperlexia
and Comprehension in Autism
By Patricia WIGGINTON
M
any parents of children with autism
spectrum disorder (ASD) are aware at
some point that their children have very
accelerated splinter skills. They excel at
a specific task that does not generalize
to other tasks. Some parents may have
noticed that their children are very ad-
vanced in art or music, or have some highly advanced
abilities to work on a computer. I know for me, that is
certainly the case. Your child is highly gifted, no doubt
in your mind as well as in the minds of many profes-
sionals. Scientific research shows that most children
with ASD have very high IQs.
Now I’m going to mention something, and you might
think I’m a little bit crazy. But have you ever noticed
your child reading? You might be sitting here read-
ing this and think, “Lady, my kid is only three years
old—there is no possible way my child can read. He
hasn’t been taught the number line, and he hasn’t
been taught his ABCs, so how is there any possibility
that he could read a single word?” But I’m going to
challenge you on that, and here’s why.
It’s called hyperlexia: “The literature on hyperlexia
is really quite scant, beginning as recently as 1967
when the term was first used by Silberberg & Silber-
berg (Exceptional Children 34:41-42). Generally, these
children have learned to read before age five with
very little or no training, and have this precocious
reading ability combined with language difficulties
(in spite of accelerated reading ability) and display
significant difficulty in social relationships.” 1 My fa-
vorite expert to refer to regarding hyperlexia is Dr.
Darold Treffert of the Treffert Center in Fond du Lac,
Wisconsin. Dr. Treffert advises that there are three
levels of hyperlexia with (or without) autism. More
than likely, however, if your child has hyperlexia, he/
she will probably fall somewhere on the spectrum.
My son James was diagnosed with severe nonver-
bal autism when he was just 18 months old, so you
30 | Autism Parenting Magazine | Issue 87
can imagine my surprise when he started to read at
the ripe age of three. And I am not talking about “go,”
“put,” or “cat.” James’s first word was “Freestar.” And
this came from a child who was considered nonver-
bal, not because he did not speak at all, but because
he could not communicate through verbal language.
He was not meeting his verbal communication mile-
stones. As a matter of fact, his father and I were be-
ginning to think (and scared to death that we might
be right) that James might be deaf. Let me rewind to
a couple of months earlier. He was not responding to
us when we spoke to him. He just kind of looked at
us with a blank stare most times. His dad, Chris, and
I had decided that we needed to start keeping track