Why do some autism experts fall for Facilitated Communication?

Watching autism neurologist Margaret Bauman being taken in by Sue Rubin’s facilitated communication in Autism is a World got me thinking about other neurologists who have suffered similar fates. One in particular has long stood out to me: Mike Merzernich. After studying Tito, son of Soma, founder of the Rapid Prompting Method variant of FC, Merzenich has concluded that “Tito is for real,” and “I think there could be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Titos out there.”

How can people who should know better about the neurology of autism have been so deluded? Doesn’t their own brain research conflict with the underlying assumptions of FC—namely, the assumption that autism is primarily a movement disorder?

Clever Stella (the Dog of Ms. Hunger)

Since its release early this month, How Stella Learned to Talk has already garnered more 5-star reviews than another book released last month by the same publisher (William Morrow). That other book would be the pro-FC I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust. Just a few weeks out, Stella has already broken 1000 in its Amazon sales rankings, a milestone that Dust hasn’t come close to.

“She understands everything you say”—a persistent autism meme

The autism movie I watched last week was not an FC movie, but it nonetheless raises a red flag that flies in that general direction. The movie, Music, came out a few months ago and features a non-speaking autistic girl—Music—who is played, controversially, by the non-autistic Maddie Ziegler.

Diagnostic Grammar Test

SentenceWeaver’s Diagnostic Grammar Test is ready for beta-testing. The text-input version is here:

http://autism-language-therapies.com/DiagnosticTest/test_login.html

And the speech-input version, which runs only in Chrome and requires you to enable your microphone, is here:

https://autism-language-therapies.com/ORAL_DiagnosticTest/test_login.html

The point of the test is to detect difficulties in those areas of grammar that come naturally to most native English speakers but can pose challenges to individuals with autism and to non-native English speakers.

Still, it’s possible for native speakers to take this test and make mistakes: as you’ll see if you try it out, all it takes is a lapse in concentration!

Unlike SentenceWeaver’s teaching tool, the diagnostic tool doesn’t give you corrective feedback. However, since it needs to elicit particular words, phrases, or structures in order to assess particular grammar and syntax skills, it will sometimes ask you to reword your answer.

You’re welcome to try it out on yourself on your kids, and you can sign in using whatever name you’d like. Feedback appreciated!

My thoughts on Twitter’s other AI problem are out on Persuasion

Social media platforms are arbitrarily banning users because their AI platforms can’t take a joke.

Colonotomy!

I just found out that a copy editor removed a colon from a key sentence in the critique I just published of Jaswal et al’s pro-FC eye-tracking study. The resulting sentence is incoherent:

Indeed, it would be quite strange if there were the ability to answer open-ended questions, or, more generally, to participate in a communicative exchange, is independent of linguistic medium (speaking, writing, typing), and is limited only by one’s ability to function in that medium (to pronounce words, to write letters and spell words, to type and spell words) and by one’s general communicative competence.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the interested reader to figure out where the colon goes.

Hint: here is the immediately preceding sentence:

There is, in fact, no empirically established or diagnostically categorized language disorder that combines extant oral skills with conversation skills that only emerge during hunt-and-peck typing.

Word to the wise: when reviewing proofs, make sure to look for tiny strike-through marks through punctuation marks whose occasionally crucial function your copy editor may have somehow overlooked.

A recent eye-tracking study fails to reveal agency in assisted autistic communication

One year ago, Vikram Jaswal et al published a study claiming to find empirical support for a method of facilitated communication known as Spelling to Communicate.¹

Finally, a critique of it has been published. You’ll find it in here, in Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention.

Floor Time embraces Facilitated Communication

I’m not sure why I didn’t see this coming years ago—except that years ago, when I first heard of Floor Time, no one was talking publicly about FC. “Years ago” was the late 1990s, and, following the 1993 Frontline exposé Prisoners of Silence, FC had gone underground. (I had thought it had been so thoroughly debunked that was gone, gone—as in gone for good).

J.B. Handley and the ever-changing cure for autism

In promoting his FC miracle cure book, J.B. Handley has been making the rounds, appearing most recently on JennyMcCarthyTV.

Some random thoughts about reading instruction

Phonology is not about spelling. If you don’t believe me, look for the word “spelling” in the index of a phonology textbook.

I Have Been Buried Under Years of Autism Miracle Stories

Back when my son was first diagnosed, they were miracle stories about ABA therapy, the gluten-free diet, Floor Time, and chelation. But at some point after the turn of the 21st century the narrative shifted—and now it’s all about FC. Hard on the heels of Handley’s Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, which came out last month, we have Gilpeer’s I Have Been Buried Under Years and Dust (her FCed daughter is credited as co-author), which came out last week. Gilpeer, till now a relative unknown in the world of autism advocacy, has landed a bigger publisher than Handley (William Morrow), and gushing reviews in both the Washington Post and NPR.

Underestimated: How Vaccines Create Geniuses and How Letterboards Unlock Them

The first autism cure memoir of 2021 has just come out: J.B. Handley’s Underestimated: an Autism Miracle. Handley is the author of the 2018 anti-vaccine book How to End the Autism Epidemic and, back in 2005, the co-founder (with his wife) of Generation Rescue, an organization that, besides blaming childhood vaccinations for autism, has promoted scientifically discredited treatments like gluten-free diets, megavitamins, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

But Handley’s 2021 miracle cure book isn’t about the gluten-free diet, or the vitamin B-12 doses, or the ten fecal microbial transplants, or the “more than 100 ‘dives’” into hyperbaric oxygen chambers to which Handley has subjected his autistic, non-speaking son Jamison.

Why is remote learning so awful?

I’ve just updated my flipped-learning piece from a few years back to try to answer the question of why remote learning and working is such a miserable experience for so many of us.

Lit Crit Meets “Autism”: Transgressing the boundaries with some help from FC

Ralph Savarese’s follow up to Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption is the even more modestly titled See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. Also common to both books is that much of the content derives from facilitated communication. In Reasonable People, the facilitated individual is Savarese’s adopted son, Deej; in See It Feelingly, Deej is joined by two others who communicate via FC: Tito Mukhopadhyay and Jamie Burke. Three independent communicators—people who are able to produce messages without a designated helper sitting next to them and prompting them—also make appearances: Dora Raymaker, Eugenie Belkin, and Temple Grandin.

Like Reasonable People, See it Feelingly seeks to challenge what Savarese alleges to be the dominant paradigm of autism. As the book’s publisher, Duke University Press, explains:

Another prestigious institution gets on the “Typing to Communicate” game

Beyond the University of Virginia (via Vikram Jaswal and his Eye Tracking Study), Cambridge University is also hard at work validating the latest forms of facilitated communication. I’m thinking, specifically, of Alex Woolgar, whose work (as yet unpublished) is described in detail on the International Association of Spelling as Communication (I-ASC) website.