PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN HYPERLEXIC CHILDREN

Children with hyperlexia who learn to read spontaneously before the ag e 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 investiga ted whether children with hyperlexia also have strong phonemic awarene ss skill. In the present study, several phonemic awareness measures we re administered to two children with hyperlexia and one child with abo ve average word identification skills who started to read words at a v ery early age. The results show that all three childrens' levels of ph onemic 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 qu estions for researchers investigating the condition of hyperlexia.