Abstract
Hyperlexia refers to a condition in which developmentally disordered children have advanced word recognition skills but show little reading comprehension. Clinicians have long been aware of the existence of such advanced, but specific and isolated abilities in mentally disordered children. (1945) described a case of what they called an “idiot savant”: an 11-year-old boy who, notwithstanding his behavioral problems and developmental delay, had an unusual skill in calendar computation and astonishing musical abilities. At the age of five he learned the letters from his toy blocks and developed subsequently good word recognition skills, but his comprehension remained poor. In other studies of such cases (Cain, 1969), advanced word recognition skills in the absence of comprehension have often been reported. In 1967 Silberberg and Silberberg coined the term hyperlexia to refer to this phenomenon. Several studies (Huttenlocher and Huttenlocher, 1973; Cobrinik, 1974, 1982; Elliott and Needleman, 1976; Richman and Kitchell, 1981; Healy, 1982; Needleman, 1984; Goldber and Rothermel, 1984; Frith and Snowling, 1983; Whitehouse and Harris, 1984; Siegel, 1984; Snowling and Frith, 1986; Healy and Aram, 1986) have documented the existence of the condition called hyperlexia.
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Rispens, J., van Berckelaer, I.A. (1991). Hyperlexia: Definition and Criterion. In: Joshi, R.M. (eds) Written Language Disorders. Neuropsychology and Cognition, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3732-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3732-4_8
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