Disability-Ability Matching Test

Map the three disabilities to the following purported sets of abilities.

Disabilities:

1. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
2. Autism
3. Dyslexia

Ability Set 1:

A psychologist overlooks the science and a journalist, the full story

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

Part I: The Psychologist

When it comes to facilitated communication, Psychology Today has a mixed record. While a number of its contributors (Amy Lutz, Stephen Camarata, Bill Ahearn, and Scott Lilienfeld) have spoken out against it, others (Chantal Sicile-Kira, Robert Chapman, and Susan Senator) have, to one degree or another, expressed support. Recently joining the second cohort (which consists of a neurodiversity philosopher, an autism consultant, and an autism parent) is a psychologist: Debra Brause, PsychD.

Brause’s post, entitled Nina: A Nonspeaker Who Found Her Voice, showcases a nonspeaking autistic individual who purportedly describes her feelings of being locked inside and unheard by others until she started “using a method called spelling to communicate (S2C), which enables her to share her story.” S2C has also enabled Meehan’s communication partners to conclude that “she is a deep thinker and cares about ‘every single thing’” and also that she’s bilingual:

Autism Acceptance Month–what do we accept these days as autistic?

I fidget.

Clothing labels bother me.

I cover my ears to block out sirens.

I sometimes have trouble reading faces, following conversations, and knowing what to say.

Outside of my private refuges, I’m constantly masking my inappropriate reactions and urges and trying to pass as socially acceptable.

Socially demanding events tire me out.

So does lots of volume and sensory clutter.

I can get so absorbed in high-interest activities that I lose track of time and get highly distressed if interrupted.

I sometimes echo pithy things I heard earlier or “script” lines from movies and TV shows.

In other words…

I’m neurotypical.

And as a neurotypical person, I try to be fully accepting of autistic individuals, including of their right to communicate authentically without having their words, or their status as actually autistic, hijacked by others.

From Literacy to “Support Needs” to “Communication Boards”: How vague guidelines enable non-evidence based claims and practices

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

When you write general guidelines, you need to make clear not just what you’re saying, but what you’re not saying. And to figure out which things, of all the things you’re not saying, you most need to emphasize as things you’re not saying, you need to take a look at who is likely—unwittingly or deliberately—to misinterpret what you’re saying, and in what ways.

Malapropism watch (3rd in a series)

• “jumpstart a new career” for “start a new career”
• “fulsomely competent” for “fully competent”
• “in a dilemma” for “in a bind”

See also Part I and Part II.

Facilitated messages attributed to different people show distinctive styles, but this fails to rule out complete facilitator control

 (Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

I got so distracted with other pro-FC developments that have emerged since last August—Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls, Jennifer Binder-Le Pape’s purported myths about RPM/S2C, Vikram Jaswal’s latest pro-S2C paper, and some half-dozen other developments—that I’m only now getting to the second of two papers published this past year by Nicoli, Pavon, Grayson, Emerson, and Mitra, the first of which I critiqued here at the end of August.

As with Nicoli, Pavon, Grayson, Emerson, and Mitra (2023), this second paper, (Nicoli, Pavon, Grayson, Emerson, Cortelazzo, and Mitra, 2023), focuses on touch-based facilitated communication (FC) as used with individuals with cognitive and sensorimotor disabilities. (The individuals’ precise diagnoses and measured language skills remain unspecified). The authors’ other paper provided a highly quantitative task analysis of the sensorimotor skills involved in sitting in front of a keyboard and pointing to letters; this paper provides a highly quantitative stylistic analysis of a database of facilitated messages in Italian. Its goal is to explore who authored these messages—the facilitator, the facilitated person, or some combination of both.

This article purports to build on other analyses of facilitated messages that have found the texts of the facilitated individuals (or facilitatees) to differ stylistically from those of their facilitators—particularly in the more frequent appearances of unusual words and neologisms (made-up words). Such differences, the authors acknowledge, are not proof of authorship by the facilitatees (they cite Saloviita, 2018). And it’s impossible to know, they concede, what the facilitatee’s texts would look like, stylistically speaking, without the assistance of a facilitator, since none of the facilitatees can type independently. But the authors nonetheless insist that such a quantitative study can potentially answer questions about authorship.

Life lessons from programming

1. Your instructions must be crystal clear, not omit any steps, and anticipate all possible scenarios.
2. If something goes awry, there’s always a logical explanation.
3. If something goes awry, it’s your fault, not that of The Cosmos.
4. You are not the victim of an irrational universe.
5. Instead, you are complicit in much of the irrationality that most directly affects you.

I was reminded of these lessons last week when creating a new username and password facility for SentenceWeaver: a tricky endeavor as I didn’t want to undermine the older first-and-last-name-based logins that my current users are using. The trickiness was exacerbated by the fact that there was some zombie code hiding in one of my files–entirely my fault, of course.

Illusions of literacy in nonspeaking autistic people: a response to Jaswal et al. 2024

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

Do minimally-speaking autistic individuals have literacy skills?

You might assess this by seeing if such individuals can associate word labels with objects—placing the “dog” label, say, on a picture of a dog, and the “cup” label on the picture of a cup. You might assess this by seeing if the person can independently write or type out word labels of their own for the dog and the cup. You might assess this by presenting the person with a note that says, say, “Do you want to watch a video or go outside?” and seeing if the person, for example, responds by fetching a video-playing iPad. That note could be written on paper, but it could be typed out on the overwhelming majority of AAC devices that, contrary to what the pro-FC sector tells you, include keyboards and regularly expose users to printed word labels.

But why use such direct, straightforward literacy probes when you can instead deploy novel equipment and fancy statistics to generate much more indirect and highly indeterminate results? After all, that’s precisely what Vikram Jaswal did in his recent attempt (Jaswal et al., 2020) to find support for the variant of FC known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C, see Beals, 2021 for a critique of this highly flawed study).

This time around, in a study that has just come out (Jaswal, Lampi, and Stockwell, 2024), Jaswal sets out to explore the literacy skills of minimally-speaking S2C users—which, if they are found to exist in sufficient quantities, might convince some more people that S2C is valid. (In fact, the only procedures that would definitively test the validity of S2C, should anyone ever agree to participate in them, are a series of controlled message-passing tests).

From proto-syntax to actual syntax

Many minimally verbal, severe-to-moderately autistic individuals are able to pick up, with little to no instruction, what we might call “proto-syntax”: namely, how to put nouns, verbs, and adjectives together in an order that reflects the word order rule of their native languages—whether through speech, written words, or pictures.  For English, this means putting the subject noun before the verb and the object noun after the verb:

• I want cookie.
• Daddy push truck.

At the two-word level, proto-syntax includes the “telegraphic speech” evinced not just by language-delayed autistic individuals, but by typically developing two year olds:

• Truck red.
• Mommy come.

Some people equate this sort of basic content-word ordering with actual syntax: after all, it implicitly encodes which noun is the subject and which noun is the object. But actual syntax involves so much more than how to order subject and object nouns into simple sentences.

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part II

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

This post continues my critique of Jennifer  Binder Le-Pape’s recent blog post on the official Spelling to Communicate (S2C) website. This piece, as I noted earlier, professes to give readers valid, evidence-based arguments against what she calls the “top 10 myths” perpetrated by critics of Spelling to Communicate and other variants of facilitated communication (FC).

What Binder-Le Pape actually puts forth, however, are a combination of argument from authority, straw man arguments, circular reasoning, and unsupported and misleading statements. Last time I showed how this plays out in her first 5 purported myths; I pick up here at Myth 6.

Myth 6, per Binder-Le Pape, is that “It is dangerous to presume competence; an individual should prove that they are authentically communicating before participating in a public forum.” Here, Binder-Le Pape cites the legal system, which, she says, “presumes adults to be competent unless proven otherwise.” This would make it legally impermissible to assess people for competence. After all, if we’re required to presume competence, then presumably we shouldn’t be assessing it. But most of us recognize that evaluations of competence are sometimes necessary.

Several reasons to doubt that rates of autism are going up

Do increases in diagnosed autism reflect significant increases in actual rates of autism, which here in the U.S. now stands at 1 out of 36?

Source: Wikipedia
There are several reasons to think that the answer is probably “no.”

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part I

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

Curiously, moments after my latest piece in Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention came out (more on that later), a January blog post on the official Spelling to Communicate (S2C) website crossed my radar. This piece, by S2C promoter and parent Jennifer Binder-Le Pape, professes to give readers valid, evidence-based arguments against what she calls the “top 10 myths” perpetrated by critics of Spelling to Communicate and other variants of facilitated communication (FC).

What Binder-Le Pape actually puts forth, however, are a combination of argument from authority, straw man arguments, circular reasoning, and unsupported and misleading statements.

News rundown: more non-academic requirement in schools

(As if grit, growth mindset, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and all that social stuff weren’t already enough.)

Last year, New Jersey became the first state to require media literacy at every grade level. According to the New Jersey state website, students must now learn “the difference between primary and secondary sources” and “the difference between facts, points of view, and opinions.”

Will they also learn the difference between made-up facts and well-substantiated opinions? Or that many primary studies involve flawed research, misleading literature reviews, and footnotes that don’t support the claims?

Last month, New Jersey also became the first state to require “grief education,” which will be integrated into health classes.

According to the New Jersey state website:

Why apraxia can’t explain away the need for physical touch, held-up letterboards, or hovering prompters

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

The most helpful comments we receive on this blog are ones that point us to specific articles that we haven’t yet reviewed here and may not be aware of—and that may be of possible relevance to FC.

Last week a reader, commenting on this post, suggested that we “familiarize [ourselves] with some of the most recent research regarding developmental dyspraxia (what some folks refer to as apraxia) in autism to understand the unique motor challenges in autism.” This commenter, who characterized herself as “a PT who has a PhD with the focus on differentially [sic] brain connectivity in autism,” referred us to three articles: Dziuk et al. (2007); Mostofky et al. (2011); and Torres et al. (2013). These articles are not currently included on our website, and so I went and read them a few days ago. In this post, I’ll discuss each one in terms of its connections to claims made in support of FC.

Malapropism watch, continued

(A follow-up to my earlier post.)

“transcend” for “extend beyond”

“account for” for “take into account”

“fringe on” for “hinge on”

“affiliated with” for “associated with”

“suspect of” for “suspicious of”

“on par with” for “in line with”

(Mostly heard on National Public Radio).