For these pre-school children, reading can be a powerful tool for developing language, social and behavioral skills. Children with hyperlexia are able to decode the printed word at a very early age. This skill is not taught by parents. Between three and four years of age, the children teach themselves how to recognize words, sometimes before they have really learned to talk. Some children learn to read words by sight, while others are able to phonetically decode any word they see.
Some children are able to spell precociously as well.
One child, when given an alphabet puzzle for his third birthday, looked at it for a few minutes and then rearranged the letters to spell chipmunk. He felt compelled to find a word that did not use duplicate letters. The most common disorder evidenced by children with hyperlexia is in language learning. They have difficulty processing the language they hear, and some of their early speech attempts are patterned jargon in which the intonation of the phrase is discerned, but their reproduction of the words is not accurate. They may attempt to use the patterns in semi-appropriate ways.