Studying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read (washingtonpost.com)
Fascinating article on hyperlexia, a disorder where children begin reading spontaneously at a very young age. This is different from being a gifted or early reader, since other delays are associated with hyperlexia.
“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.”