Hyperlexia in children with autism spectrum disorders
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Updated: Jul 19, 2026

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism
Published on: October 3, 2018
Tina M Newman1, Donna Macomber, Adam J Naples
1PACE Center, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Abstract:
We compared the reading-related skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders who have hyperlexia (ASD + HPL) with age-matched children with ASD without HPL (ASD - HPL) and with single-word reading-matched typically developing children (TYP). Children with ASD + HPL performed (1) better than did children with ASD - HPL on tasks of single-word reading and pseudoword decoding and (2) equivalently well compared to word-reading-matched TYP children on all reading-related tasks except reading comprehension. It appears that the general underlying model of single-word reading is the same in principle for "typical" and hyperlexic reading. Yet, the study revealed some dissimilarities between these two types of reading when more fine-grained cognitive and linguistic abilities were considered; these dissimilarities warrant further investigations.
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