The closest thing I have to a specific “splinter skill” or “savant skill” is my ability to read. I don’t know exactly when I started reading, but my parents have told me that I learned to read very well at a fairly early age. I can cite a couple of full-length novels, aimed at adults, that I read while in elementary school. I was not only able to read– to look at words on a page and say them out loud– unusually well, but also had very good comprehension of what I read.
There’s a term for people who are sort of like me in this: hyperlexia. But that usually implies being good at reading in the page-to-sound sense while also lacking reading comprehension or having other difficulties with language. I first learned about hyperlexia from Mel Baggs. You can read some of hir (Mel is agender and goes by sie/hir pronouns) posts about hyperlexia here and here.
I’m inclined to say that I am hyperlexic, and I find it frustrating that the researcher quoted in that Wikipedia article thinks that “autistic and hyperlexic” is a single subtype, as if autistic people all have the exact same capabilities with language. My personal speculation is that “decoding”, reading comprehension, and expressive language (and many other aspects of language) are all completely separate, that someone can have any combination of talents and impairments in different areas of language.
Some Open Space 