Hyperlexia They are extremely good at decoding language and thus often become very early readers. Some hyperlexic children learn to spell long words (such as "elephant") before they are two years old and learn to read whole sentences before they turn three. An fMRI study of a single child showed that hyperlexia may be the neurological opposite of dyslexia. The word hyperlexia is derived from the Greek terms "hyper" ("over") and "léxis" ("diction", "word"). Although hyperlexic children usually learn to read in a non-communicative way, several studies have shown that they can acquire reading comprehension and communicative language after the onset
Hyperlexia comprehension is the understanding of a longer text. In both studies, interpretation and meaning based tests proved difficult for the hyperlexic subjects. In the Weeks study, the subject was unable to identify characters based on the logographic aspect of the writing system, and in the Lee and Hwang study, priming was ineffective in decreasing reading times for hyperlexics. Although it is generally associated with autism, a 69-year-old woman appears to have been made hyperlexic because of a "cerebral infarction in the left anterior cingulate cortex and corpus callosum". Hyperlexia Hyperlexia is a syndrome characterized by a child's precocious ability to