Studying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read (2024)

By the time he was a year old, Alex Rosen of Bethesda would spend time at birthday parties thumbing through magazines while other children played with toys. By the time he was 3, if his mother's finger skipped a line as she was reading a story, he would place her finger on the correct point in the text. By the time he started school, he was reading like a 12-year-old.

No one taught him to read, but Alex, who is now 11, learned on his own to organize letters in alphabetical order while he was still a toddler. He has never had to study for a spelling bee.

"When he was two, I could take him to a really nice restaurant and we would bring a stack of books," said his mother, Ilene Freed Rosen. "He would look through them. People would walk up and say, 'How old is he?' I'd say, 'two,' and they would say, 'My god, my kid would have been running around.' "

Alex has hyperlexia, a condition whose features look like the opposite of the reading and learning disorder dyslexia. The condition endowed him with some unusual abilities, but it also exacted a price: He was slow to begin speaking, and he still has some trouble with verbal communication and difficulty grasping the rapidly changing social rules of 11-year-old children.

Hyperlexia is extremely rare. About two in every 10,000 children with "autism spectrum disorders" have hyperlexia, and researchers believe that studying Alex's development may help explain why some children naturally pick up reading the same way that others pick up spoken speech. The results, they hope, may also improve the understanding of disorders such as dyslexia and autism, and also help other hyperlexic children.

There is controversy about whether hyperlexia is linked to autism or whether it is a distinct disorder. Georgetown University developmental neuroscientist Peter Turkeltaub, who has studied Alex, said he was not even sure whether to call hyperlexia a disorder or simply a phenomenon.

Understanding hyperlexia may also help explain how normal brains accomplish the feat of reading. Unlike seeing and hearing, skills acquired through evolution, reading is usually not acquired naturally. Humans have been reading for only a few thousand years, and the pressure for everyone to become good readers has become intense in only the past couple of centuries.

Reading involves a complex series of brain activities: Visual centers must first perceive variable, tiny features of printed symbols on a page, then those changes must be mentally converted into strings of sound, and finally the patterns of sound must be interpreted by language centers in the brain to register their meaning.

"Hyperlexia is the antithesis of dyslexia," said Guinevere Eden, director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning, who has studied Alex. "We spend all our time studying individuals who have a hard time learning to read, and here are these children who acquire reading in a spontaneous way. It's as if they know it already."

In a study conducted when Alex was 9 years old, researchers compared his brain function while he was reading with that of other children his age and with children who were older but read at the same level. Alex's reading ability was six years ahead of his age.

In a paper published in the journal Neuron in January, the researchers reported that the Bethesda youngster had heightened brain activity in two areas, according to lead author Turkeltaub. One area was the left interior frontal gyrus, located behind the middle of the temple, the other was the left superior temporal cortex, over and behind the ear.

"If you're reading a word that you've never seen before, you need to first translate the letters into sounds, and then put those sounds together to make a whole word," Turkeltaub said in an e-mail. "In your brain, the left superior temporal cortex will translate the letters to sounds, and the left inferior frontal gyrus will put those sounds together to create the whole word."

Alex, it seems, had a very advanced ability to identify individual sounds while reading and then to manipulate those sounds in his head. But paradoxically, even as he incessantly read text, including traffic signs and license plate numbers, Alex had trouble understanding the meaning of what he read. With training, his speaking ability has improved and he has become skilled at reading nonfiction. But he still has difficulty with fiction, in which important aspects of a story, such as a character's inner motivations, are not explicitly described.

The lack of insight into how others think affects Alex's life. If two classmates are not talking to one another, for example, Alex has trouble connecting that behavior to a fight the children had the previous day, his mother said.

"The lessons they need to learn are not in books," Rosen said of children with hyperlexia. "Is a joke funny the second time? Not if you tell it to the same person. It's so difficult to teach someone to be a social human being."

Rosen teaches Alex to pay attention to slang, which is an important part of social communication, especially among children. Rather than fight his natural talent at reading, Rosen has used printed text as a means of communicating with her son. Alex still speaks very formally, mimicking the cadences of written speech. He never uses the interjection "like," the way many youngsters do incessantly, and his sentences are always grammatical and complete.

These skills helped him run for student council president -- and win. He is a fearless public speaker, and his mother had to tell Alex that other children are typically nervous in front of an audience.

But Rosen worries that Alex's lack of insight into how other people think may leave him too trusting -- his personality is as open as the books he loves. Deception is beyond him, which is why Rosen actually celebrates when Alex tries to manipulate her.

"I love it when you lie to me, Al," she told him in the presence of a visitor last week. "Because it tells me you know what I'm thinking."

Someday, Ilene Freed Rosen sighed, her guileless child would make a fabulous husband.