Facilitated communication: a failure to replicate the phenomenon.
Facilitated communication disappears when the facilitator is kept from seeing the questions, so the words are not the child’s.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested facilitated communication with kids who have autism. A helper held the child’s hand while the child typed answers to questions.
The twist: the helper could not see the questions. If the child truly read and typed, the answers would still be right.
What they found
No child gave correct answers when the helper was blind. The typed words stopped making sense.
The study showed the helper, not the child, was guiding the keyboard.
How this fits with other research
Lyons (1995) ran the same blind test and got the same null result. Together the two papers form a clean replication: FC fails when the helper does not know the prompt.
Michael (1988) found that kids with autism can struggle to pull words out of memory. That real language weakness made the miracle claims of FC look extra unlikely.
Cohen (2003) showed one child moved from echoing to true words after fun peer play. That honest, tiny gain contrasts with FC’s big but fake breakthroughs.
Why it matters
You may still meet parents or schools who hope FC will unlock hidden speech. This paper gives you clear, kind data: the typed words come from the facilitator, not the client. Skip FC and spend your hours on methods that pass a blind test, like aided AAC with independent selection or naturalistic language training.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Twenty-one subjects participated in a study of Biklen's and Crossley's hypothesis that persons with autism show unexpected literacy and improved communication ability through the process of facilitated communication (FC). Repeated measures of literacy were conducted at (a) a baseline test of communicative ability before FC; (b) a pretest with facilitation; and (c) a posttest with facilitation after 20 hours of training. At both the pretest and posttest, the facilitators were screened from hearing or seeing the questions or pictorial stimuli. Although some facilitators reported newfound communicative abilities during training sessions, no client showed unexpected literacy or communicative abilities when tested via the facilitator screening procedure, even after 20 hours of training. Separate analyses indicated that some facilitators influenced the communicative output of their clients.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1993 · doi:10.1007/BF01046053