Hyperlexia average for their age groups. Literacy education in South Korea involves teaching students entire words, rather than starting with the relationship between phonemes and letters in Hangul, despite evidence that letter name knowledge is useful for learning to read words that have not been taught. The results suggest that hyperlexics are able to obtain the relations between letters (or the smallest unit of the writing system) and their phonemes without knowing the names. Comprehension difficulties can also be a result of hyperlexia. Semantics and comprehension both have ties to meaning. Semantics relates to the meaning of a certain word while
Hyperlexia be expected given their age. First named and scientifically described in 1967 (Silverberg and Silverberg), it can be viewed as a superability in which word recognition ability goes far above expected levels of skill. Some hyperlexics, however, have trouble understanding speech. Some experts believe that most children with hyperlexia, or perhaps even all of them, lie on the autism spectrum. However, one expert, Darold Treffert, proposes that hyperlexia has subtypes, only some of which overlap with autism. Between 5 and 20 percent of autistic children have been estimated to be hyperlexic. Hyperlexic children are often fascinated by letters or numbers.