The performance of hyperlexic children on an "incomplete words" task

Hyperlexic children were found to outperform normal controls in a task involving the ability to decipher "incomplete words", in which letter-identifying cues were made ambiguous through deletion. Superior performance was characterized by rapidity of response, fine-grained discrimination, and dependency upon the larger visual array. the rapid, complex syntheses achieved by the hyperlexic children is related to recent work involving the nature of visual information processing by the right hemisphere and to the suggestion that a unique form of reading may result from right hemispheric mediation. Finally, the possible process similarities relating hyperlexia to autism are discussed.