By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 1, 2004; Page A08

By the time he was a year old, Alex Rosen of Bethesda would spend time at birthday parties thumbing through magazines while other children played with toys. By the time he was 3, if his mother's finger skipped a line as she was reading a story, he would place her finger on the correct point in the text. By the time he started school, he was reading like a 12-year-old.

No one taught him to read, but Alex, who is now 11, learned on his own to organize letters in alphabetical order while he was still a toddler. He has never had to study for a spelling bee.

"When he was two, I could take him to a really nice restaurant and we would bring a stack of books," said his mother, Ilene Freed Rosen. "He would look through them. People would walk up and say, 'How old is he?' I'd say, 'two,' and they would say, 'My god, my kid would have been running around.' "

Alex has hyperlexia, a condition whose features look like the opposite of the reading and learning disorder dyslexia. The condition endowed him with some unusual abilities, but it also exacted a price: He was slow to begin speaking, and he still has some trouble with verbal communication and difficulty grasping the rapidly changing social rules of 11-year-old children.