[kokey]

My son is hyperlexic (and on the autistic spectrum) and he basically taught himself to read phonetically when he was 3 by watching youtube videos of phonics. I was not taught reading at a young age, it was considered bad to teach kids early where I grew up, but when I started school at 6 and we did the phonics I was almost immediately able to read well beyond my age. Hyperlexia is a bit like the opposite of dyslexia and I think it's is a bit of a spectrum where most people find themselves closer to the center. My son really struggled with receptive language, or language in general. Hyperlexic kids often only start to get the hang of receptive language (as in understand spoken language) and use language for communication (aka 'start talking') between the age of 4.5 to 5.5, so I suspect kids who are less on the hyperlexic side (aka most kids, and also 'early talkers') probably only start to get into the groove of reading after that age. Hyperlexia and dyslexia is just symptoms of a component of our brains that processes our environment and I think there's huge variation in humans when it comes to this and it's kind of independent from our intelligence (though it could affect our test scores, for sure)