Failure to confirm the word-retrieval problem hypothesis in facilitated communication.
Blind tests keep killing FC: when helpers can’t see the cue, the typing stops making sense.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested kids with autism who could not speak. Each child used facilitated communication, or FC. A helper held the child’s hand while the child typed on a keyboard.
The researchers hid the pictures or words from the helper. If the child really knew the answer, the typing should stay accurate. If the typing stopped being right, the helper was probably guiding it.
What they found
When the helper could not see the cue, the typed answers were never correct. The kids did not show hidden word-finding trouble or a visual problem. The mistakes came from the helper, not from the child.
How this fits with other research
Castañe et al. (1993) ran the same blind test two years earlier and got the same null result. Together the two papers form a clean replication: FC fails once facilitators are screened.
Michael (1988) found that verbal kids with autism do struggle to pull words out quickly. That looks like a clash, but the children in J’s study could talk. The 1995 kids could not. Different groups, different tasks, so both findings can be true.
Smith et al. (2010) showed that verbal children with autism can learn new words fast when adults point and name. Again, the kids could speak. The 1995 paper simply shows that non-speaking children’s FC typing is not a secret route around word-retrieval problems.
Why it matters
If a family asks you to support FC, show them this blind-test evidence. Explain that the helper’s touch, not the child, drives the message. Shift the plan to methods with solid data, such as speech-generating devices the child controls alone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two hypotheses were raised and empirically tested to account for the failure of previous controlled validation studies to find evidence of literacy in nonspeaking persons with autism using facilitated communication: (a) The naming tasks used in other studies have triggered specific "word retrieval" problems, or anomia, and (b) a perceptual problem, visual agnosia, prevents subjects from recognizing objects without touching them. Three nonspeaking autistic children who had used facilitation for at least 2 years were evaluated with four experimentally controlled tasks, over a period of 5 months. In descriptive and object handling tasks, and in a traditional picture identification task, subjects failed to type correct answers when facilitators were blind; one subject, however, occasionally engaged in signing and vocalizations that were context-appropriate. Results reflected a generalized language deficit, rather than isolated word-finding or perceptual difficulties, and were consistent with many previous studies revealing facilitator cuing. Questions are raised about inconsistencies in pseudo-correct scores, a measure of facilitator influence, reported here and in previous research.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1995 · doi:10.1007/BF02178190