PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN HYPERLEXIC CHILDREN

Children with hyperlexia who learn to read spontaneously before the age of five are impaired in reading and listening comprehension but have been found to have word recognition skills well above their measured cognitive and linguistic abilities. Even though many reports have been published about these children, to date, only one study has investigated whether children with hyperlexia also have strong phonemic awareness skill. In the present study, several phonemic awareness measures were administered to two children with hyperlexia and one child with above average word identification skills who started to read words at a very early age. The results show that all three childrens' levels of phonemic awareness were low and not commensurate with their word reading skill. Wide inter- and intra-individual variations were found on all of the phonemic awareness measures. These findings pose a number of questions for researchers investigating the condition of hyperlexia.