Hyperlexia in children with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

We compared the reading-related skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders who have hyperlexia (ASD + HPL) with age-matched children with ASD without HPL (ASD - HPL) and with single-word reading-matched typically developing children (TYP). Children with ASD + HPL performed (1) better than did children with ASD - HPL on tasks of single-word reading and pseudoword decoding and (2) equivalently well compared to word-reading-matched TYP children on all reading-related tasks except reading comprehension. It appears that the general underlying model of single-word reading is the same in principle for "typical" and hyperlexic reading. Yet, the study revealed some dissimilarities between these two types of reading when more fine-grained cognitive and linguistic abilities were considered; these dissimilarities warrant further investigations.