Mj. Cohen et al., NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILES OF CHILDREN DIAGNOSED AS SPECIFIC LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED WITH AND WITHOUT HYPERLEXIA, Archives of clinical neuropsychology, 12(3), 1997, pp. 223-229
This study compared the neuropsychological profiles of 46 children wit
h Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 16 children with SLI and Hype
rlexia (SLI + H). The results indicated that the essential feature of
Hyperlexia is Specific Language Impairment and not reading disability.
Thus, Hyperlexia would be best conceptualized as a subgroup of Develo
pmental Language Disorder rather than as a subgroup of Developmental D
yslexia. Further; the SLI + H group exhibited significantly better dev
eloped visual/spatial memory which, along with average visual perceptu
al skills, appears to be the major contributing factor to their elevat
ed word recognition and spelling ability Finally, it should be noted t
hat both groups of children exhibited decreasing performance on tasks
of immediate auditory/verbal memory as the language/semantic demands o
f the memory task increased. This finding appears to be the result of
a limited capacity for immediate verbal processing and not the result
of a deficit in verbal learning and recall. (C) 1997 National Academy
of Neuropsychology.