#hyperlexia — Public Fediverse posts

#Introduction with a billion #hashtags...

I'm Alba, a #trans #nonbinay #bisexual #autistic #vegan #antifascist #activist from #Nijmegen, #NL. In addition to my #autism, I've also got #ADHD, #hyperlexia, assorted auditory processing and executive function issues, #aphantasia and #SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory).

I'm a senior #IT #tech at a large #international company and an avid #volunteer as well: I do IT support/admin for a national #TransRights #advocacy #NGO (Transvisie), I'm a volunteer driver for an NGO that provides low cost door to door transportation for (mostly) the #elderly (#ANWB AutoMaatje), and once or twice per month I collect donated #bread from #artisanal bakeries for distribution to #unhoused people, #refugees, and people who are dealing with #poverty (Buiten de Brood).

I speak #Nederlands, #français, #English, #Deutsch and #Esperanto. I play #saxophone - I have a bari sax, a tenor sax and a soprano sax. I also have a #flute and a #ukelele but I don't play those nearly as well as the saxes. I love playing #TTRPG like #DnD5e and #PF2e, and I have two #cats, an orange slonk called Hobbes and a void chonk called Nita.

I used to hang out on mastodon.lol until early 2023 when that instance shut down. I then moved to todon.nl and eventually decided to hop on to blahaj.zone ​:Blobhaj_Love:​

(Updated on 10 August 2026)

I learned to read when I was two or three. I suppose that means I have/had hyperlexia. My vocabulary has gotten me in trouble. I've been accused of being pretentious, but there's no pretense. I know what the words mean. I was also accused of plagiarism in university because "no second year student can write that well."

That accusation resulted in serious writer's block. I did the research for my paper, but I couldn't make myself write it. I was worried I'd just be accused of plagiarism again.

Another time I wrote a paper and a prof was upset that I used uncommon words without defining them. I didn't know which words she meant because I read a lot and know a lot of words. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know which words needed to be defined.

When I don't know what a word means, I look it up. I love learning new words.

I was a very unpopular, bullied child, and I learned my vocabulary from all sorts of books. I read pretty much everything with words, from toilet cleaner labels to Regency romances to westerns to dictionaries to Beowulf. And when I was in high school, I read medical journals for fun.

I guess it should be no surprise I ended up being a writer. #hyperlexia #ActuallyAutistic #WritingCommunity

The first rule of #hyperlexia club is you can't stop talking about hyperlexia club.

#ActuallyAutistic

Awesome symptom no. 7
Interesting reading and writing skills

Some autistics can read very fast, or very early, and/or in quite unusual styles.

For example, mirror writing and reading/writing upside down are among the interesting skills that can be sometimes seen in autistic people (these skills, when seen in more prounounced ways, are known as hyperlexia).

#Autism #Hyperlexia

Hyperlexia: Systematic review, neurocognitive modelling, and outcome
Ostrolenk et al 2017

Some children can begin reading as young as 18 months (?!?!?!?!?!?!) Wow!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341630639X

#autism #hyperlexia #neuroscience #science #reading

#Design #Guidances
How people read online · Insights on online reading behaviors and tips for creating accessible text https://ilo.im/11ixqa

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#UiDesign #VisualDesign #WebDesign #Content #Reading #Scanning #Eyetracking #GazePattern #CommitmentPattern #Fpattern #LawnMowerPattern #LayerCakePattern #PinballPattern #SpottedPattern #AccessibleText #Accessibility #A11y #Autism #Blindness #Dyslexia #Hyperlexia #LowVision

@KatyElphinstone I never realised that being able to read upside down wasn't something everyone could do until one day at school the teacher got freaked out that I was writing down what she was about to say before she said it.

Her desk was facing mine, and she was just reading from notes sitting in front of her, and as I could read and write faster than she could speak, I didn't see much point in waiting. Apparently most people could barely read her handwriting even right-way around, never mind upside-down :D

#Hyperlexia

I learned a new word today: #hyperlexia

which is when a child starts reading at an age MUCH earlier than developmentally expected (in my case, letter recognition before age 1, silent reading around age 2) -- and this is a common occurrence in folks with #autism (which we know can be comorbid with #adhd )

it's opening a door that I'm not so sure I want to walk thru again -- realizing what an utter fking waste my life has been thinking i'm something else.

Lots of us watch videos or listen to podcasts at 2x speed, right? This seems to be a pretty well known thing. Less than 1.75 just always seems too slow for me.

But this is only true when someone is speaking normally. If someone is reading from a script, it sounds completely unnatural to me, and I can't process it all, even at normal speed, unless I concentrate exceptionally hard.

Someone suggested that maybe it's that the average person isn't very good at reading aloud, but I don't think it's that. Even top-rated audiobooks are also entirely impossible to listen to.

Doe anyone else relate to any of this, or have any pointers to anything where I could learn more? I've read some stuff on #AuditoryProcessingDisorder, but most of that doesn't apply to me, and I'm struggling to find anything else related.

One clue seems to be that stand-up comedy seems to work, even though that's mostly scripted. I don't really know what the difference is, but my guess would be that they work hard at making it sound natural, whereas most people reading speak in a different manner. But I don't have the vocabulary for describing any of this, so don't know how to google for more.

#AskingNeurodivergents #AskingAutistics #AskingADHD #ADHD #Autism #Hyperlexia #ActuallyAutistic #APD

So I learnt yesterday about #hyperlexia 😮 And this is me. At 2.5 years old, I knew all the capital letters. At 5 I was able to read the newspaper. This basically made me eat books until my 25. I can scan pages. Unfortunately since then, I've found myself unable to read books anymore, the amount of attention I have to put there is ginormous and I often can't cope with it. Anybody relate?
Hyperlexia, if it's also new to you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia #auDHD #ActuallyAutistic @actuallyautistic

#Hyperlexia can look and feel like #Dyslexia.

I read faster than my ability to process it. My brain is word-hungry and forages for delicious information like a hunter-gather looking for the juiciest fruits. The words jumble up because I jump from place to place in the sentence/paragraph.

As a child I was an advanced reader, but now as an adult I would probably be picked up on a dyslexia test. I often wonder if some dyslexics are actually hyperlexics.

#actuallyautistic #adhd #autistic

I'm #SemiSpeaking #ActuallyAutistic because I require monotropic flow to organize my thoughts, which is difficult in social situations, and my age-intensified #hyperlexia and #ADHD has made that extra difficult.

Physical socializing is a #polytropic situation. There's environmental inputs, the person talking and my feeling of the person perceiving me. This prevents monotropic focus from forming so I can't organize a sentence.

#Monotropism #Nonverbal #SemiVerbal #Autistic