Michelle Dawson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Give us, say, half a dozen. Just bullet points. The almost classic example is hyperlexia, which you see starting with very early development. You see this in very young autistic children, who have a spontaneous interest in printed materials. It can be just text, but the information can include other kinds of printed materials: numbers, combinations of letters and numbers. And they use this information across different scales. So from individual letters like the alphabet, given the opportunity, they will order individual letters into the order of the alphabet, for instance. But they don’t just use single letters. They will also use complex arrays of texts, like newspapers. These are very young children — that’s going to start at age two. If they’re in a book-rich, text-rich environment and have free access to this, they will figure out how language is structured, and that happens even with very difficult orthographies like English. English orthography is so difficult that typical children take an extra year or so to learn it because it’s wacky. In a lot of ways it doesn’t make sense; the rules don’t make sense. But autistic children, even starting, these very young children can work this out, and they figure out the irregularities. They figure out the irregularities using the sort of array of information from letters to words to phrases to sentences to paragraphs to entire text and arrays, and so on. They’ll figure it out, and typical children don’t really do this spontaneously. My mother used to tell me that when I was two, I just taught myself how to read. For a very long time, I never took her seriously. I just thought, “Well, mothers say things like this.” But when I learned about hyperlexia, it occurred to me that she had an actual, literal point. So, if you’re a hyperlexic, and then you grow up, you keep some kind of special reading ability typically?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.