Autism Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Autism, including details on symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, causes, effects.

Hyperlexia in children with autism spectrum disorders.

Newman TM, Macomber D, Naples AJ, Babitz T, Volkmar F, Grigorenko EL

PACE Center, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

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.

Published 6 April 2007 in J Autism Dev Disord, 37(4): 760-74.
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