This Web Site was created by Charlotte Miller. I welcome your comments and feedback. Please write to me at
Hyperlexia@GeoCities.com
An examination of the language learning and comprehension issues that may arise for hyperlexic children during the school years, by Charlotte Miller, parent of a hyperlexic child, with special thanks to Linda Burns, MHSc, Speech-Language Pathologist with the Integrated Preschool Speech and Language Services in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada , for her feedback and invaluable assistance.
As children move through the school years, the language and reading demands placed upon
them not only increase, but also change in nature, as they are called on to not only
extrapolate, or infer, information from materials read, but to also put that information
into use. Often in the early grades problems with reading comprehension, which are due to
the very nature of the language disorder of hyperlexia, are not apparent because of the
excellent memory skills and the intelligence that are often evident in these children. These
comprehension issues, when they do arise, are more properly addressed as
language-comprehension issues, and not simply as difficulties with reading comprehension.
Linda Burns, MHSc , Speech-Language Pathologist with the Integrated Preschool Speech and Language Services in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, points out some of the issues that may arise in language comprehension in hyperlexic children as they move through the school years:
Reading comprehension, per se, is not necessarily what is going to be challenging....what is going to be more of a challenge is using the information he reads....
As children progress through school, language demands increase because of a number of things....more abstractions, and also more decontextualized information....increased reliance on "meta" skills (especially "metalinguistic" skills, which allow us to stand back and analyze language; metapragmatic skills, which allow us to understand the listener's perspective; indirect request....["Gee, I wish somebody in this house would clean up this mess", as opposed to "You clean up this mess"]; and metacognitive skills, which allow us to analyze and adapt our own strategies of thinking and learning), the increased need to inference, both within and across sentences (for example, knowing what/who pronouns in a story refer to, and using prior and life knowledge to further understand what is read), and the development of several different types of discourse (for example, procedural discourse, fictional discourse, explaining, and drama).
These are only a few examples but the important thing here is that these are language skills. So, for a child with a language delay or disorder, tasks requiring these skills may be a challenge. And, since language underlies all three, reading, writing, and oral language will be more difficult as requirement for use of these skills increases.
In considering the language-learning issues that might arise for children with hyperlexia as
they move through the school years, it might also be instructive to consider Bloom's
Taxonomy of Thinking Levels, for these translate very well to the consideration of language
comprehension issues. These levels are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation. The first level, knowledge, is likely one of the major strengths of
many children with hyperlexia, for they often exhibit superior memory skills, as well as
exhibiting vast stores of information memorized on subjects of interest. The levels of
comprehension and application, or understanding and use of information, are likely to be
the areas where language-comprehension issues will first be noted. In moving to the higher
levels, analysis, or the ability to break down materials into component parts, synthesis, or
the ability to put the materials together to form something new, and evaluation, the ability
to judge materials for a stated purpose or to support and defend an opinion, are areas
where language comprehension issues may exhibit themselves most clearly in the reading of
materials, but, also, as an example of the interesting dichotomy of hyperlexia, may also be
the same levels where many of these children will excel in mathematics.
Hyperlexic children are often highly intelligent, and it is often difficult for many of those
dealing with these children to understand that these intelligent, often highly-verbal
children may likely have difficulties with areas of language comprehension after many of
the more noticeable difficulties of hyperlexia are much less evident. These language
comprehension issues must be addressed as difficulties with language learning, and not
simply as reading comprehension issues. Only through the understanding of the nature of
the language disorder at the heart of the hyperlexic learning style can these issues be
properly addressed.
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This Web Site was created by Charlotte Miller. I welcome your comments and feedback. Please write to me at
Hyperlexia@GeoCities.com
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