Abstract
Hyperlexia is characterized by spontaneous and early acquisition of reading skills, manifested before the age of five, without any formal education. Expressive and receptive language deficit, excellent memory, delayed language skills, echolalia, perseverations, and difficulty to understand verbal contexts, are common symptoms in individuals with hyperlexia and global developmental disorders, including Asperger's syndrome. The aim of this study was to describe the reading skills of individuals with hyperlexia. The participants were six boys with a history of hyperlexia, perceived by relatives before 36 months of life, chronologically aged between four years and four months to five years and two months. The following evaluation procedures were applied: interview with the parents or responsible guardians, communicative behavior observation, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), recognition of alphabet letters and numbers, School Performance Test, text reading, and reading comprehension. The participants showed different performances in the PPVT, and recognized letters, numbers and isolated words. There was difficulty in answering the writing subtest; the majority did not understand the text that they read and all of them demonstrated recognition of letters and numbers. Some participants were able to read words and texts. However, all participants presented alterations in other areas of language development, such as receptive vocabulary, communicative behavior and understanding of the material read, in addition to altered behaviors of social adaptation, both interactive and restrictive.
Highlights
Hyperlexiais is characterized by spontaneous and early acquisition of reading skills, manifested before the age of five, without any formal education(1,2)
The analysis of the receptive language of the six participants assessed through receptive-auditory vocabulary resulted in different scores, considering the classification standards proposed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT)
The literature(13) indicates that language development in individuals with Asperger’s syndrome is founded on isolated and limited interests, which impairs the process of language acquisition
Summary
Hyperlexiais is characterized by spontaneous and early acquisition of reading skills, manifested before the age of five, without any formal education(1,2) It can be a result of obsessive behavior associated with excellent development of visual-perceptive skills in a context of altered language development, and it is not necessarily correlated to intellectual abilities(3,4). It is inferred that this lack of knowledge is related to the prevalence of the phenomenon; in other words, the literature(2,7) shows that the accurate prevalence rate of hyperlexia has not been entirely discovered, varying according to specific criteria(9). The less rigorous these criteria are in relation to the diagnosis of hyperlexia in autistic children, the higher the discrepancy of prevalence rates. Joshi et al(4) conducted a study based on the bibliography published from 1999 to 2009 and found only 22 works on this topic
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