Our communication rights paper is out!

Despite all the pressure from self-styled neurodiversity and disability rights advocates who support facilitated communication, Rapid Prompting Method, and Spelling to Communicate, a reputable journal dared to publish it

You can access the entire article here.

Jefferson Public Radio on “Medford psychiatrist’s research into autism and telepathy sparks debate over communication”

Continuing my closer look at some of the news items from our recent news roundup, I now turn to a May 2nd piece on Jefferson Public Radio entitled Medford psychiatrist’s research into autism and telepathy sparks debate over communication. This new item showcases Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist Dr. Diane Powell, whose name should be familiar to anyone familiar with the Telepathy Tapes as the Telepathy Tapes’ star, pro-telepathy scientist.

While the article’s focus is on Powell and on how she came to believe that non-speakers are telepathic, it is also, necessarily, an article about RPM/S2C.  That’s because a video-taped RPM/S2C session that Dr. Powell has “watched countless times” is part of what convinced her—or so journalist Justin Higginbottom suggests. As he describes it:

On the screen is Haley, a nonverbal child with autism, sitting next to a therapist. Across the room, her mother lifts a card off the table, showing the image on it — a triangle — to the camera, but not to Haley.

The therapist, holding an electronic letter board that resembles an iPad, asks Haley to spell what’s on the card.

Slowly, Haley taps out the answer.

She presumably types out “triangle,” which is correct.

“You can see the therapist is not moving this device,” Powell noted.

Haley repeats the feat over and over again, slowly typing out words that match the image on the cards.

Like the January 10th Disability Scoop piece (see here), this piece does acknowledge the controversy surrounding RPM/S2C:

The debate comes down to that therapist in Powell’s video holding the letterboard while Haley spells out words. Supporters say it’s a breakthrough for many with autism. Critics say it’s a red flag.

And Higginbottom even goes so far as to speak, at length, with one of the directors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)—something that very few journalists covering RPM/S2C in the popular media have bothered to do:

“Spelling is not the issue. It's doing it independently,” said Jaime Van Echo, associate director of clinical issues at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA).

The organization is generally against communication practices involving heavy assistance from another person. That could be someone touching the nonverbal individual’s arm, prompting them in certain ways or even holding a letterboard in front of them.

“The main difference here is that… they're holding the board, which means that the other person, who's the independent communicator, is communicating with the support of another person,” Van Echo said. “And what ASHA really does strive for is independent communication.”

Someone using a letter board that’s lying on a table is perfectly fine, according to Van Echo. But problems may arise, according to ASHA, when someone else is involved in the conversation.

It might seem like a small distinction. But the group has gone as far as saying another assisted practice, called the Rapid Prompting Method, “effectively strips people of their human right to independent communication.” The organization has spoken out against teaching a similar method, called Spelling to Communicate, in schools.

But then Higginbottom, who is clearly striving for “balance,” returns to the pro RPM/S2C side:

But proponents of these assisted methods argue many with severe autism struggle with motor skills or focus. Without assistance, they say, the opportunity to communicate may be lost.

This is something he could have run past Van Echo at ASHA; if he had, he would have learned that claims about difficulties with motor skills or focus don’t validate FC/RPM/S2C.

Worse, Higginbottom takes on faith a claim made in Heyworth et al.’s highly problematic Presuming Autistic Communication Competence and Reframing Facilitated Communication article:

A 2022 Frontiers in Psychology article cited more than 100 peer-reviewed studies confirming people with autism are the ones communicating while using assisted methods.

If you read that article carefully, you see that it simply states that “peer-reviewed studies confirming autistic or disabled authorship of FC messages number over a hundred from the 1990s to the present” and then cites an article by Cardinal and Falvey (2014). If you chase down that footnote, you find that Cardinal and Falvey, in turn, state, without any supporting citations, that:

Since the inception of FC, well over 100 qualitative articles have been published in professional peer-reviewed journals, as compared with around 40 for quantitative studies.

One of my colleagues tried contacting both Cardinal and Falvey and asking them for a reference; she received no response.

Extraordinary claims like these require extraordinary evidence, and in Cardinal and Falvey’s citations, which number less than 80, there are, at most, 13 studies that could possibly qualify as peer-reviewed studies finding some weak support for (and not coming close to confirming) autistic or disabled authorship of FC messages. In general, as Scott Lilienfeld has said, there is an inverse relationship between study rigor and support for FC/RPM/S2C.

Apparently not realizing this, Higginbottom goes on to cite the highly problematic pro-S2C organization International Association for Spelling as Communication (I-ASC) and its citation of the highly problematic Jaswal et al. (2020) eye-tracking study.

The International Association for Spelling as Communication cites a study that tracked the eye movements of non-verbal individuals. It found that they appeared to focus on the correct letters before selecting them — proof that people with autism, not their aides, are the ones communicating.

No, “appearing to focus on the correct letters before selecting them” is not “proof” that the people being subjected to FC/RPM/S2C are the ones communicating (for details, see critiques here and here).

But then Higginbottom returns to the FC/RPM/S2C critics:

But other researchers disagree. A 2001 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders reviewed studies on a related method known as Facilitated Communication. It found the facilitators, rather than the nonverbal individuals, were controlling communication.

In the end, though, “balance” wins out:

So, it’s safe to say that the science around this debate isn’t settled.

Actually, the science is quite settled, and all those instances of alleged telepathy that both Dr. Powell and the Telepathy Tapes podcast have compiled for us, the non-paranormal explanation for which is facilitator control, only settle it further.

Worse, the article captions one of its pictures with this:

Some have found success in using letter boards to communicate with people with severe autism.

Technically, “find success” is ambiguous: the success could be an illusion. But this is also a stand-out sentence: one that is sure to grab the attention of, and stick in the minds of the many people who won’t read the full article.

Returning to Powell and telepathy, Higginbottom does note that:

Although the Telepathy Tapes and Powell’s work have led to more parents learning about their method or similar systems, advocates think being associated with mind reading is hurting their efforts to gain wider acceptance for assisted communication.

In that last excerpt, Higginbottom links to the statement on telepathy by the International Association for Spelling as Communication (I-ASC). For those who are interested, here’s what Vosseller & Co have to say about telepathy:

I-ASC does not integrate or endorse telepathy or other such personal beliefs as part of S2C. Introducing such concepts into S2C compromises the integrity [sic] and credibility of this rigorously defined [sic] methodology.

Recent public discussions linking telepathy to nonspeaking individuals and S2C risk creating misunderstandings about the practice. I-ASC emphasizes that telepathy is outside the scope of S2C and unrelated to its science-based [sic] approach.

One can only hope that telepathy is hurting I-ASC’s efforts to gain wider acceptance.

But Higginbottom ends with a different sort of hope, or “hope.” In a concluding section entitled “Hope for Parents,” he tells us about a non-speaking girl who, at age 10, “gained a limited ability to speak.” She, too, is apparently telepathic, but her telepathy has expressed itself through speech; not S2C. Her mother reports that she was once:

deciding whether to pack a grapefruit in her daughter’s lunch, and Ginny — unprompted — yelled “grapefruit" from another room.

Yet, for all this, the mother wants to switch from speech to S2C:

But she has trouble communicating with her daughter — even with the mind reading. That’s why she wants to teach her to use a letterboard.

Higginbottom continues:

As Dr. Powell explains, the beliefs that “her daughter is in there” and that she has “far more capacity than people give [her] credit for”—beliefs that Powell appears to share—“is why her research resonates with so many parents.”

Indeed—as with so much of other autism quackery, so, too, with S2C and telepathy.

REFERENCES

Beals, Katharine (2021, May 12). A Recent Eye-Tracking Study Fails to Reveal Agency in Assisted Autistic Communication. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2021.1918890

Cardinal, D., & Falvey, M. (2014). The Maturing of Facilitated Communication: A Means Toward Independent Communication.
Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 39:3, 189-194. 10.1177/1540796914555581

Heyworth, M., Chan, T., & Lawson W. (2022). Presuming autistic communication competence and reframing facilitated communication. Frontiers in Psychology.

Jaswal, V.K., Wayne, A. & Golino, H. (2020) Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific Reports 10, 7882. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64553-9

Vyse, Stuart. (2020, May 20). Of Eye Movements and Autism: The Latest Chapter in A Continuing Controversy. Skeptical Inquirer.

 

Cincinnati local news and NPR Weekend Edition on Jakob Jordan

Continuing my closer look at some of the news items from our recent news roundup, I now turn to three items that focus on the son of Cincinnati radio personality Jenn Jordan. The first is an April 10th interview on WLWT News 5 Today (a news station out of Cincinnati) entitled Son of Cincinnati radio personality defying the odds during Autism Acceptance Month.

The focus of this interview is Jenn Jordan’s non-speaking, autistic son, Jakob, who is described as “using his platform to defy the odds.” But even though he’s right there, sitting next to his mother, Jakob’s platform does not include this interview. Instead, Jenn is the one being interviewed. Jakob’s “platform “turns out to be S2C, described here as “communicat[ing] through spelling.” During the interview, Jakob is almost entirely silent. It’s hard to tell whether he’s even attending: he rarely directs his eyes towards the interviewer or his mother. And, for reasons that we learn only later in the interview, no S2C occurs here, nor are there any letterboards in sight.

Referred to mostly in the third person, Jakob is described as having been “diagnosed with autism and apraxia.” And while there is little doubt autism diagnosis, the basis for the apraxia diagnosis remains unclear. According to Jenn Jordan:

The apraxia causes a brain-body disconnect. And so the body doesn’t do what the mind wants it to, including speaking, including trying new foods. Refusing to try anything new.

There are various types of apraxia with varying diagnostic symptoms, but none of them fit Jordan’s description. Being minimal speaker doesn’t suffice. Nor does apraxia involve not being able to try new things. Finally, the notion that Jakob has some sort of brain-body disconnect is belied by the 10-second clip we see of him, 2 minutes into this segment, performing a series of complex dance movements in synchrony with the people around him. In addition, at the end of the video, we hear Jakob utter words that sound like “What date?,” and that his mother interprets as Jakob intentionally asking when the movie he’s staring in will come out (more on that below). Even Jakob’s speech, minimal though it may be, appears to be under intentional control by Jakob’s brain.

Nonetheless, in an eerie echo of Isaiah’s story in Disability Scoop (see my previous post on that), Jakob’s S2C-generated messages informed his mother that:

he was tired of eating the same old stuff, he wanted to try new stuff and he told us exactly how to help him. Since then he has tried over 160 new foods.

It’s interesting to see, both in this news item and the earlier one on Isaiah, a purported apraxia/mind-body disconnect being used to explain, not just Category A of the diagnostic symptoms of autism (the communication challenges), but also Category B (the restrictive interests). Though this is the first time I’ve seen restrictive interests re-analyzed as a motor disorder, it’s completely consistent with the decades-long goal of FC-proponents to redefine all of autism as a motor disorder.

Jenn Jordan goes on to explain that “If you want different results you have to do things differently,” and to recount how, after Julie Sando from Autistically Inclined (on our list of S2C-providing organizations) introduced S2C to Jakob:

It became very clear very quickly that the intellectual disability he had been diagnosed with was completely a mislabeling.

And thus, yet again, we see the deeply ableist, anti-intellectual disability sentiments that underpin parents’ and proponents’ beliefs in S2C.

As for Jakob, he doesn’t appear responsive even when the interviewer addresses him by name—until his mother responds by turning to him and making physical contact. She seems to do this reflexively each time the interview addresses her son directly. Why doesn’t she instead hold up a letterboard for him and facilitate out messages? Eventually we learn the answer:

This is so very hard for him because there is so much in here that he wants to say and someday he’ll be able to do it with me. We’re working on it.

The reason there’s no letterboard or S2C here is that Jakob is unable to do it with Jenn; or, perhaps more accurately, Jenn is unable to do it with Jakob. Why she didn’t bring along Jakob’s communication partner is left unclear.

Jenn’s inability to do S2C with Jacob recalls the Talia Zimmerman story (see here), in which we learn that those subjected to RPM/S2C “are far more proficient at spelling when they’re working with their professional partners than with parents, siblings and others.” As I noted in that post, in comparison to most facilitators, who bypically have months or years of experience cueing multiple people, parents are comparative novices.

Towards the end of the interview, we learn from Jenn Jordan that Jakob was

recently contacted by a Hollywood casting director who saw his Cards by Jakob page on Facebook and asked if he would be interested in auditioning for a film.

Ultimately, Jakob landed a leading role, and a subsequent news segment us more about this—namely, a June 5th segment on a much more prestigious platform: NPR Weekend Edition.

This segment, entitled Two nonverbal actors star in a new opera — with an assist from AI, includes not just Jakob, but a second non-speaking actor with cerebral palsy. And rather than spelling out the details of how, precisely Jakob communicates, it focuses instead on

• the novel elements of the technology that converts Jakob’s “spelling” into naturalistic voiced output, and
• the supposed input regarding the technology by “the non-verbal community”

In other words, this NPR report completely leaves out the fact that Jakob and other members of the non-verbal community are being facilitated, and their communications likely authored, by their FC/RPM/S2C communication partners.

It was a five-year process. For the first two years, accessibility designer Lauren Race queried the non-verbal community about what they wanted from a new speaking device. She asked, "What do you want with this thing? What's wrong with it? What do you love? What do you hate?"

"There's this mantra that everybody in this community uses," said Prestini, "which is 'nothing about us without us.'"

Or, rather, “nothing about us without our facilitators.”

Or, rather, “nothing about the personas concocted by the facilitators without the facilitators who concoct those personas.”

Throughout the piece, remarks about technological developments and the input of non-verbal people continue to distract from the communication-rights-violating elephant in the room. One caption reads:

Jakob Jordan tries out the technology that allows him to add emotional content to his speech by speeding it up, slowing it down, and adding pauses.

We also hear the usual pro-FC/RPM/S2C conflation of FC/RPM/S2C and AAC (Alternative and Augmentative Communication, evidence-based and not facilitator-controlled). Here, the conflation is especially easy, given that the role of the S2C communication partner is completely omitted:

Some nonverbal people, like Jordan, use an augmentative and alternative communication device, or AAC device, to talk. They type words into the device and a voice reads them.

But the voice sounds emotionally flat — like a robot. The team fed the AI some of the natural sounds both Jordan and Zioueche made, and it created voices for them.

Inevitably, as well, we get the usual S2C-generated testimonials:

“As someone who was not able to fully communicate for the first 22 years of my life, it is mind-blowing to be in an opera and to be here sharing on NPR.”

And:

“When I first heard the sound of my voice come to life, a new realization was born," he said through the new device. "Dream the bigger dreams, you know, the ones you dismiss and hide away because they seem impossible."

It’s because of articles like this (and this and this) that I stopped donating to NPR. I now direct that money to the Internet Archive, which has kept alive an older FC-critical documentary from more journalistically responsible times of yore.

The last piece about Jakob takes us back to Cincinnati, this time to Local 12 News. This segment, dated July 3rd, is entitled My world has opened up': Son of local radio host changes life through tech, therapy.

Once again we learn about Jakob’s brain-body disconnect:

He was using his device to share his favorite foods during a recent trip to Las Vegas to see his favorite band, New Kids on the Block. Two years ago, such communication would have been impossible for Jakob Jordan, who struggled with a disconnect between his body and brain.

But this time we learn more about Jakob’s first S2C session, which features, as so many of these sessions do, the typing out of a sophisticated vocabulary word:

after discovering that he could spell and read, his mother collaborated with speech therapist Julie Sando to unlock his potential. The first word Jakob Jordan typed was "analogy," and he understood its meaning.

As I noted earlier, one of the main goals of the first lesson is to get the parent coming back for more, and one of the best ways to do that is to dazzle them by “unlocking” sophisticated knowledge or vocabulary that they had no idea their child had acquired.

For me, the most impressive things about Jakob are neither his purported vocabulary and literacy skills, nor the fact that he has an S2C-enabled role in a musical. Rather, what impresses me are the clip of Jakob dancing at about two minutes into the first segment, which I watched several times, finding it quite endearing; and the pictures on the cards credited to him in Cards by Jakob, which I’m assuming are his own authentic work. It seems reasonable to presume that Jakob has the competence to control his body, and it looks like he has artistic talent and enjoys using it. He also looks like a calm, happy person.

Let’s celebrate all that—and, most importantly, celebrate Jakob for who he really is.

Twitter suspensions and their aftermath

Every so often my Twitter suspension comes up on social media, with various detractors of mine voicing different theories about why I was suspended from Twitter. 

FC/RPM/S2C proponents seem to think I was suspended for “bullying” remarks and/or “violent threats” against autistic individuals and/or autistic advocates. Crazy as this sounds, I have screenshots that show FC/RPM/S2C proponents actually saying this. (In the interest of basic decency, however, I'm keeping those screenshots private).

Structured Word Inquiry proponents prefer to think I was suspended because I called SWI a “cult” run by a shadowy and now deceased man in France with no formal linguistic credentials--a characterization of the man in question that, ironically, the person who first made this claim against me now agrees with. (I have screenshots to prove this as well but, again in the interest of basic decency, I'll likewise keep those private).

Progressive math proponents may think I was suspended for harassing them and finding fault with “social justice math.” (Who knows? It's not always so easy to see what people say beyond your back.)

And so on...

As for Twitter itself (this may have changed on X), once it suspends an account, it feeds such sundry impressions by one’s sundry detractors with canned messages about the account’s suspension that are automatically sent to anyone who “reported” the account for any reason.  People, naturally, report Twitter accounts for all sorts of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with Twitter’s rules. Some people, for example, prefer to eliminate their critics rather than debate them.

Unless you’re sufficiently famous, however (e.g., the past and present President of the U.S.), Twitter’s/X's suspension decisions aren’t made by human beings mulling over tweets, but by AI bots programmed to look for certain key words and phrases (“kill”, “smash”, “vaccine injury”). That’s because human moderation is costly, and because the number of human moderators needed to review every possibly bullying/threatening/ dangerously misinformative tweet is astronomical. Key word-based moderation, of course, is about as linguistically crude as it gets, and the result is that many suspensions are senseless. 

Twitter tattlers, of course, prefer to think that Twitter suspended their opponents for good reasons–i.e., because they reported them for bad behavior. But there aren’t enough people on Twitter’s staff for human review of more than a tiny fraction of what’s reported. And if Twitter’s bots were to automatically suspend everyone who gets reported by someone else, Twitter would eventually amount to little more than cat videos. 

None of these considerations–assuming they even occur to them–stop certain Twitter tattlers and their allies from proclaiming, without evidence, that their detractors have made bullying or threatening remarks on Twitter or elsewhere. And though one might challenge them, as I have, to find a single bullying or threatening remark in anything one has ever written anywhere, the sort of people who prefer to resolve disagreements by tattling, blocking, and suspending may not be the sort of people who think that accusations (or autism interventions, or reading instruction, or math curricula) should be supported with actual evidence.

As for my particular situation, I've known for several years now that my suspension was triggered by more than just certain key words. There was an actual human being involved (I have screenshots of that, too--it's quite the smoking gun). But because this person is near and dear to me, I have made a promise to that person not to disclose that person's actions publicly. The person in question, meanwhile, has expressed remorse for their actions (which also include twice deleting all the blog posts on this site) and has been making it up to me ever since.

University of Toronto Magazine on “When Words Won’t Cooperate”

In this post, I’ll focus on a second news item from my recent news roundup: a January 23^rd article in the University of Toronto Magazine entitled When Words Won’t Cooperate.

In this article, journalist Alison Motluk focuses how a neuroscientist in the University of Toronto psychology department, Morgan Barense, “aims to crack the mystery of non-speaking autism.” The mystery, apparently, has to do with how much spoken language non-speaking autistic individuals understand. But this is something for which non-neurological measuring tools already exist (e.g., oral prompts and pictures to point to in response). And those non-neurological measuring tools have found language comprehension in non-speaking autism to be quite low, especially in those with motor skills impairments (Chen et al., 2024). (In Chen et al., motor skills were measured by something called the DCDQ. The DCDQ rates complex motor skills like throwing a ball and pointing, as opposed to simple ones like pointing, which, contrary to the claims of FC/RPM/S2C proponents, don’t appear to be impaired in non-speaking autism). Motor skills impairments, in turn, have long been the excuse for FC/RPM/S2C.

Motluck opens with a description of an autistic boy named Isaiah Grewal. At age 2, Isaiah was not only non-speaking, but also not “responding normally when people spoke to him.” This suggests that Isaiah’s language challenges included not just speech but also comprehension—just as Chen et al. would predict. Indeed, even at age 10, when Isaiah was still not speaking, “His parents couldn’t tell from his reactions whether he understood what they were saying.”

But, like many individuals with autism, including individuals with low comprehension skills, Isaiah showed signs of hyperlexia. That is, he would “use foam letters or fridge magnets to spell things out — words like ‘contents’ and ‘bonus material’ that he’d seen when watching a Baby Einstein DVD.” And this hypelexia of his seems to be what caused his mother, sensing that “there was more cognitive ability in him than was being tapped,” to try out S2C on him when he was 13.

Some of the messages attributed to Isaiah through S2C are those we’ve seen repeatedly (see also my previous post): being able to communicate amounts to “freedom from prison,” and the whole time he was in that prison he wanted people to know “That I’m in here.”

But among the first messages attributed to Isaiah are a few that were far less typical. They included, for example, messages about restaurant food like this one: “I want to eat off a menu like a normal teen.” Since “new foods had always upset him,” this message was enough to “stun” his parents. Via S2C, Isaiah purportedly explained what was actually going on. As Motluk puts it:

[He]e’d wanted to eat the new foods, but he didn’t have the motor control to do it. The same muscles that made it impossible for him to speak, he told them, made it impossible for him to eat those things.

That’s something I’d never heard before, so I looked up the research. One review of extant studies finds a disjunction between speech-motor challenges and oral-motor challenges; another (a scoping review)  finds a connection and reports that these can occur in autism. However, Isaiah’s ability to eat “fries and nuggets and chocolate” for years, but not “new foods,” doesn’t quite sound like an oral motor challenge.

Furthermore, the purported solution to Isaiah’s purported oral motor challenge is oddly simple. Via S2C, he purportedly advises his parents on how to get him to eat new things: “Push it into my mouth again. Chop it into squares. Say chew, chew, chew in a rhythm.”

We don’t learn how this advice played out. Did his parents actually push food into his mouth? How did he react? All we learn is that, as a result of this advice, they were able to celebrate his 18th birthday at a fancy restaurant, where he “ordered lobster mac and cheese, from the menu.” How this played out in terms of chewing is left unsaid. Mac and cheese is another common preference among those with limited food preferences, and it’s at least as chewable as fries, nuggets, and chocolate are—though the lobster, perhaps, adds a bit of a twist.

One thing that’s alarming about S2C is how the messages facilitated out of its victims often appear to be at odds with what they appear to actually prefer, and how the assumption that they can’t control their bodies causes their handlers to let their S2C-generated messages trump what their behavior and body language communicates. In Isaiah’s case, this happens not just with food, but with music. In an eerie echo of Anna Stubblefield’s infamous facilitation of Derrick Johnson (where an alleged preference for classical music also emerged), the article reports that “once he [Isaiah] was able to communicate using the letter board” he revealed that he “liked classical music and jazz... but not rock or pop.”

These issues, however, don’t appear to worry Dr. Barense, the neurologist who’s studying Isaiah. From her, we instead hear the usual talking points:

·        The straw men caricatures of FC/RPM/S2C skeptics.  “People assume, she says, that if a person can’t speak, they must be intellectually impaired.” Does she think people assume this of deaf people? Or of Stephen Hawking?

·        The alleged apraxia. Barense “believes that many autistic people who don’t speak may be hindered not by problems of intellect but motor control,” specifically “apraxia.” The word “believes” is appropriate here: Barense continues the long tradition of citing no evidence for apraxia in non-speakers (there isn’t any).  She also doesn’t seem to be aware of the Chen et al. study and what it says about how problems of with motor control in non-speakers correlate with comprehension deficits.

·        The circular reasoning. Barense uses S2C-generated messages as evidence for the “apraxia” that is, in turn, evidence for S2C:

Some non-speakers who have been able to describe what’s going on inside say it’s like being stuck in the body of a drunk toddler, says Barense. They don’t know why they’re suddenly vocalizing Mickey Mouse or talking about Thomas the Tank Engine or running around frantically. They don’t want to be doing these things, they say, but their bodies are like runaway trains.

·        The notion that there are no non-neurological ways to measure cognition in non-speakers: “there are no reliable ways to estimate comprehension, language ability and intellect” because all of these “ require motor output... that some people simply may not have available to them.” But all that’s required for tests of language comprehension and intellect is pointing to or picking up pictures (for language) or cards that complete patterns (for intellect), and there’s no evidence that non-speakers with autism have difficulty either with pointing to things or with picking things up. Many routinely and successfully do one, if not both, of these. For further discussion of what the actual issue with pointing in profound autism is, see my last post.

Dr. Barense, however, thinks she has an answer, which just happens to align with her general area of expertise as a neuroscientist:

Using fMRI, she and her team will look for complex patterns of brain activity that reflect high-level comprehension but do not require motor output. For instance, as a person listens to a complicated story, the researchers can track the signal in their brain as that story is unfolding. When there’s a twist in the plot, or a disruption of the narrative, they can see how the brain signal changes in response.

This sort of “signal change” strikes me highly indeterminate, especially when compared to the standard, non-neurological measures of comprehension in autism (see again, Chen et al., 2024). Signal change, that is, could easily be generated by changes in vocal prosody (the melody, rhythm, and volume of speech), as opposed to actual comprehension of word meanings. But a sufficiently biased researcher may have no difficulty interpreting it that way—and publishing articles that report such findings. In this, Barense may qualify. As she puts it, “I have a strong prediction that we will find evidence of intact comprehension. I just don’t see how it could be otherwise.”

Motluk reports that:

Barense has so far completed a baseline magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of the structure of Isaiah’s brain. Next will come scans of the brain in the process of completing intellectual tasks (known as “functional” MRI, or fMRI).

One of the challenges is that MRI scanning requires a subject to be still. And many autistic people have a lot of uncontrolled movements. Isaiah was able to be still for the 40 minutes of the scan only because of his years of motor training, says Barense.

I shudder to think what this was like for Isaiah—and at the likelihood that his consent for this was obtained through S2C and, therefore, wasn’t his.

Barense, apparently, “has applied for a grant to find ways for software to adjust for a subject’s movements” so that other S2C victims won’t have to be still when these procedures are inflicted on them. She is also “collaborating with a team from Johns Hopkins” to “use a recently developed neuroimaging technique to study motor activity in the brains of non-speaking autistic people, including Isaiah.”

Given what’s ahead for non-consenting S2C victims in terms of medical procedures like these, I find it ironic that Barense claims to feel that “it’s important to really listen to what non-speakers are telling us about their experiences and to allow them to inform the science.”  How about starting with a message-passing test that would establish who is actually doing the communicating?

Just like Barense, reporter Alison Motluk also assumes that Isaiah’s S2C-generated messages are his own.

I asked what autism felt like to him. Via keyboard, he answered, ‘Like swimming underwater 24-7 because everything feels hard to control.” I asked what he and his friends talk about when they get together online. “We mostly trash talk,” he responded. Then, later, after I’d stopped laughing, he said, “We just like to hang out in the same space and eat pizza.

“After I stopped laughing”—this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a rather low bar for humor for facilitated kids. Is “presuming competence” turning into a “soft bigotry of low expectations”? But, superficially speaking, Isaiah has met high expectations:

Isaiah has an undergraduate certificate in professional communications from the Harvard Extension School [making him the second FCed individual we know of to enroll in this school—see here] and currently holds a graduate fellowship through Stony Brook University in New York.”

(See also our new list of colleges and universities that have admitted FC/RPM/S2C-using students.)

The piece ends with a poem, allegedly written by Isaiah.

When I first came across this article (it was forwarded to me by one of my fellow FC critics, Evan Oxman), I found her on Bluesky. She had posted about the article there, and I posted a comment. This resulted in a rather long, but cordial exchange (Barense was probably a bit more cordial than I was), which I’ve reproduced in its entirely below.

MB [This is her original post]: “I am in here!” It's a sentiment I've seen expressed time and time again from non-speaking autistic individuals who were thought to be unable to express their thoughts - but ultimately gained access to communication. Hearing this call, my research is expanding in some new directions.

It seems increasingly clear that motor control challenges are a key obstacle to their communication. It's not that they have nothing to say - it's that they have difficulty saying it. With neuroimaging, I hope that we can bypass these motor challenges and better assess their cognition.

KB: Have any of these non-speakers been assessed for apraxia? There are existing explanations for lack of speech in level 3 autism based on diagnostic symptoms. (Occam's razor). Since it isn't possible to dx speech apraxia in non-speaking autism, perhaps this is something that neuroimaging could assess.

MB: I agree, diagnosing apraxia is notoriously hard for those who cannot speak and I hope that neuroimaging can help here. But motor deficits are key associated features supporting an autism diagnosis in the DSM-5, and so most autistic individuals have motor deficits in their diagnostic profile already.

KB: Imaging for apraxia shld be your 1st step: you wouldn't want to bypass a challenge that turns out not to exist. Motor difficulties (=/= apraxia) are optional in the DSM; the social challenges are not. Nor do the motor challenges explain the language challenges: www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/mot...

MB: I think the relationship between motor challenges and language challenges is very much up for debate, with a lot of work showing a tight coupling between the two. But we are absolutely looking at brain mechanisms of motor processing in this group - stay tuned.

I'll also say that given the modularity of brain function, it's entirely possible that there could be a vast disconnect between the ability to speak and the ability to understand. If one is profoundly apraxic, they would not be able to demonstrate understanding with any reliable form of behaviour.

KB: For sure there are ppl who can understand but not speak. In autism there's a tendency in the opposite direction. Many studies show a coupling of language acquisition (receptive & expressive) & degree of orienting to social stimuli-and (commensurate w/ this) low receptive language in profound autism.

MB: But if the primary underlying deficit is motor, one would also observe such coupling. Motor difficulties would prevent typical social behaviour and lead to an underestimation of receptive language. In some cases, this might be the simplest explanation (Occam's razor). That's our testable hypothesis.

KB: Much research finds reduced orienting to social stimuli in infants as young as 2 months who are later dxed w/ autism. Are you proposing that reduced social orienting is the result of motor deficits? That seems unlikely, but regardless, reduced social orienting massively derails language acquisition.

MB: Reduced social orienting could *absolutely* result from an abnormal sensorimotor system. This behaviour requires that the one (1) process perceptual info about the other person and (2) move in response. Either could be derailed by mechanisms that have nothing to do with high-level social processes.

KB: OK, I thought we were talking about motor, not sensory processing also. Regardless, processing of perceptual social information about other people is a prerequisite for language acquisition. Impaired processing (as we see in early infancy in autism) massively derails acquisition of receptive lang.

MB: It's hard to talk about motor without talking about sensory, given that they are right next to each other in the brain and the execution of any motor plan requires sensory info (this is why the term sensorimotor is so often used). But issues here will derail social behaviour, which will derail lang.

KB: Exactly. It is indeed hard to talk about motor without talking about sensory. But the reverse doesn't seem to hold: the lack preferential attention to social stimuli in 2+ month old infants later dxed with autism doesn't seem likely to have a motor component or motor-based explanation.

MB: I'd have to see that study, but they might not respond to social stimuli b/c they weren't getting the right (sensory) info needed to move their body appropriately (motor). Or maybe they had the info but couldn't mount the typical response. Or both. Or neither. Hard to disentangle without brain data.

KB: A motor-based explanation would have to somehow explain why there's attention to non-social stimuli but not to social stimuli. That would be quite a stretch. Here's one study showing such differential (social vs. nonsocial) attention: Maestro et al. (2002). doi.org/10.1097/0000... There are others.

MB: I don't think it's necessarily a stretch. It's well established that the motor system builds internal models of action that that can serve as templates to predict and interpret the actions of others (who move in more complex and unpredictable ways than non-social stimuli).

If these models are off b/c the motor system is abnormal, social behaviour will take the greatest hit. At any rate - let me do the studies and get back to you! We need more neuroimaging data in nonspeakers so we can understand the genesis of various profiles and tailor appropriate supports.

KB: Great! Important to note that it's not just social behavior, but social learning, incl. language acquisition, incl. receptive lang., that will take a hit--a huge hit. And worth questioning is the degree to which a "motor map" guides automatic orienting to social stimuli in infants < 6 months old.

[I haven’t heard from Dr. Barense since.]

 

REFERENCES:

Chen, Y., Siles, B., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2024). Receptive language and receptive-expressive discrepancy in minimally verbal autistic children and adolescents. Autism Research, 17(2), 381–394. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3079

 

 

Disability Scoop on “Communication Method Finally Gives Nonverbal Woman A Voice”

In the next few posts, I’ll be looking at some of the news items from our recent news roundup in greater depth. Proceeding in chronological order, I’ll begin with the January 10th article in Disability Scoop (Communication Method Finally Gives Nonverbal Woman A Voice.)

This article presents the usual miracle cure story of someone opened up by S2C. Less usual is the person it showcases, Talia Zimmerman. Many S2Ced individuals are characterized as having gone through some sort of regression. Usually this happens around the age of 1 ½ or 2, right around the time that children typically receive their first MMR vaccine (which is why, confusing timing with causality, so many people have claimed that the MMR vaccine causes autism). But Talia regressed at a later age (age 3) after having developed more language than is typical in regressive autism: she regressed after being able to form simple sentences. This sounds like what the DSM-IV called Childhood Disintegrative Disorder—a condition that generally has a much worse cognitive and social prognosis than other forms of autism. (Childhood Disintegrative Disorder is now subsumed, for better or for worse, under the DSM-5’s Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Post regression, Talia Zimmerman was still able to communicate, though almost exclusively “in single words, usually to describe basic needs —‘water,’ for example, and ‘ice cream.’” And so things continued for the next twenty years, until her parents stumbled into S2C.

Sara Glaser, the article’s author, characterizes S2C as a “relatively new communication method” (Elizabeth Vosseller “invented it” a decade ago) and as “pointing at letters on a panel held up by a trained practitioner” (as if there’s some special training, specifically, in how to hold up a panel).

Citing proponents’ claims, Glaser covers the usual talking points:

• The alleged mind-body disconnect in non-speaking autism. “[M]ost nonspeakers have the cognitive ability to communicate. But their bodies don’t let them.”

The best that S2C proponents have been able to come up with as evidence for a mind-body disconnect are articles showing that some fine and gross motor difficulties occur at higher rates in autism (see our critique of such articles here). As for why so many of these individuals are able to speak words to express basic needs, but not to communicate more complex sentences: that’s something that no S2C proponent has ever been able to explain, try as they might.

• Pointing to letters as involving “gross motor skills, powered by large muscles, and not fine motor skills, which are typically significantly impaired by autism.”

Pointing to letters is actually a fine motor skill; only the more complex fine motor skills, like manipulating objects or writing by hand, are (sometimes) significantly impaired in autism. Indeed, there’s no evidence that pointing per se, as a motor skill, is impaired in autism. Rather, consistent with the eight-decades-long clinically-based criteria for autism as a social communication disorder, only pointing as a communicative act is impaired in autism. Individuals with profound autism are able to stick their index fingers out and point them towards things; what trips them up, rather, is understanding that pointing is a useful communicative act that can be used to call other people’s attention to things.

• The alleged virtues of “presumed competence,” specifically in the non-speaking individual’s ability to communicate.

Whether it’s communication skills, literacy skills, or math skills, and whether the person you’re trying to help does or doesn’t have a disability, assuming that they already have an ability is a poor starting point for actual success. Would you want your Spanish teacher to skip over the basics and start speaking to you in fluent Spanish? Or your flight instructor, also presuming competence, to throw you into the pilot’s seat on day one?

• How “presume competence” is assumed from the very first S2C “lesson,” which often seems to focus on astronomy or earth science: in this case, the facilitator “reading a passage about the International Space Station.” (See also here.)

I’m guessing that part of what’s going on here is customer development. Surely that first lesson, though purportedly aimed only at the student, is largely for the parents as well. One of the key objectives is to get parents coming back for more, and one of the best ways to do that is to dazzle them by “unlocking” sophisticated knowledge or ideas that they had no idea their children’s brains contained: from sophisticated vocabulary like “amber” and “fossilization” to songs they’ve composed in their heads. Or by eliciting heartwarming messages and reassurances like “I love you mum” and “Great life is ahead.” What we don’t seem to get at these first sessions are more mundane messages like “I’d prefer it if you didn’t keep whisking the board away,” and “Why are you blocking me off in the corner of the room?”

• The notion that the practitioners are “absolutely not prompting their clients.”

This is a common fallacy, not just among the people observing facilitators (see, e.g., here), but among the facilitators themselves: many facilitator prompts, cues, and board movements are subconscious yet powerful enough to completely control messages.

• The notion that the “biggest proof” of this is “when [their clients] tell us something we don’t know.”

Since they resist formal message passing tests, “something we don’t know” might not be an objective fact like what’s in a picture that the facilitator didn’t see, but rather something sort of unverifiable thought, memory, feeling  that the facilitator unwittingly attributes to the person they’re facilitating, like “I prefer classical music to gospel,” “I remember Big Ben and the soldiers with enormous hats,” or “We who have autism are semi-detached from the flow of time.”

• The notion that the worst thing a parent can hear about their child is that they have an intellectual disability: “Every assessment, they would use the phrase, ‘severe intellectual disability.’ That’s what they kept saying,” said Lisa Zimmerman [Talia’s mother]. “But there was part of me that always thought she could do more.”

I can’t think of a single parent testimony about the virtues of S2C that doesn’t include the tremendous relief the parent(s) felt when they learned that, or were confirmed in their faith that, their child wasn’t intellectually disabled, despite all the medical reports to the contrary.

Glaser does acknowledge that S2C is controversial:

A related program, called facilitated communication, has been largely discredited due to evidence that the facilitators were prompting their nonspeaking clients, in part by holding or guiding their hands.

Spelling to Communicate, too, has detractors. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) recommends against its use, arguing that it “strips people of their human right to independent communication because the technique relies on an aide for prompting,” according to the organization’s website...

And she does include a few telling details:

• On reported rates of use: Glaser reports that the S2C advocacy organization, the International Association for Spelling as Communication, estimates that approximately 10,000 non-speakers are using the method.
• On cost: Glaser notes that, since “Most accredited schools don’t use it. Insurance won’t cover it, she said, people are typically paying out of pocket—to the tune of $85 an hour.”

$85 an hour—for many hours a day, presumably, especially if the parents aren’t able to do it themselves (see below). That’s why the aforementioned customer development is so important.

• On alleged success rates: “DiTomaso  [co-owner of the Access S2C clinic, on our growing list of S2C peddlers] said the program has worked with all of their clients thus far” but adds that “some are quicker to adapt to the letter board, can answer more sophisticated questions and are able to more quickly progress to a keyboard.”

In other words, all their clients are susceptible to cueing, but some are more susceptible to cueing than others.

• On what took for the parents to fall for it, despite knowing that it’s controversial.
• For the mother, it was a combination of the S2C miracle cure memoir Underestimated; viewing a live S2C session; and the failure of all other interventions “from speech therapy and applied behavior analysis to chelation therapy [a quack therapy involving the dangerous removal of heavy metals from the body]” to have the effects she was hoping for. As she puts it, “This is the only thing that has worked. You watch these young adults spelling — I don’t know what else people need.”

From what we’ve seen, the mother’s trajectory is typical. Nothing else works; this seems to work for other people.

·        The father, on the other hand, “admits to being skeptical.” When his daughter started spelling out answers to questions about the International Space Station, his first reaction was “Where’s the trick?” and “This is like a magic show.”

This is a much more accurate characterization what’s actually going on with FC/RPM/S2C than what the proponents claim.

·        Both parents remain unclear on where their daughter “learned how to spell and acquired so much knowledge.”

·        But the father, having moved beyond magic tricks, now hypothesizes that his daughter learned about, say, the Mona Lisa “while watching a TV program with him on Italy;” that “she picks up information in ways that other people don’t;” and that “her brain absorbs information at a greater depth than other people.”

We’ve seen this sort of explanation repeatedly: the unexpected knowledge that S2C unlocks purportedly comes from brains that are unusually good at absorbing oral and visual information in the ambient environment, including from TV and radio.

• That those subjected to S2C, Talia included, “are far more proficient at spelling when they’re working with their professional partners than with parents, siblings and others.”

We’ve seen this repeatedly (e.g., here, here, and here). It’s likely a reflection, in part, of the selection bias in who becomes a facilitator (being a true believer from the get-go) and a reflection, in part, of the reality that people get better at (unwittingly) cueing people over years of practice with many different clients (such that parents, compared to facilitators, are total novices).

Of course, the practitioners have a completely different explanation: doing S2C is purportedly, as Glaser puts it, “more emotional with a parent” and “more stressful.”

• That this girl, like so many of those subjected to S2C, doesn’t read books or other texts: “She’s never picked up a book, never surfed the internet that I’m aware of,” her mother notes.

Spellers but not readers—we’ve seen this repeatedly as well. And it’s one of many red flags that raises serious questions about actual literacy and actual language comprehension in FC/RPM/S2Ced individuals. And that should have raised serious concerns with this article’s author, journalist Susan Glaser.

 

FC/RPM/S2C News Roundup: January to July, 2025

It’s been about 6 months since our last news roundup of FC/S2C/RPM, and we just finished our seven-part series on the Lower Merion trial, so we thought it appropriate to roundup and post the FC/S2C/RPM. news items that have come out since the turn of the year.

One striking thing, overall, is how few of these articles are about the Telepathy Tapes, briefly the number 1 podcast on Spotify, and perhaps still the more popular podcast on non-speaking autism. I guess, for all their love of a feel-good story, few journalists want to go quite as far as telepathy—except (as we’ll see) in the context of critical, curious, investigative journalism.

So here, in chronological order, is what’s come out since our last news roundup in the way of feel-good stories about FC/RPM/S2C. I’ll follow these up with a few news items were significantly more critical (yes, there were actually several of these this year!).

January, 2025

A January 10th article in Disability Scoop entitled Communication Method Finally Gives Nonverbal Woman A Voice.

This article presents the usual miracle cure story of someone opened up by S2C. The person it showcases, Talia Zimmerman seems to have like what the DSM-IV called Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, now considered part of the DSM-5’s “autism spectrum disorder.”

The article characterizes S2C as a “relatively new communication method” (Elizabeth Vosseller “invented it” a decade ago) and as “pointing at letters on a panel held up by a trained practitioner” (as if there’s some special training, specifically, in how to hold up a panel).

The article is unusual in acknowledging that S2C is controversial: author Susan Glaser mentions the warnings by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) against its use. But, as is clear from the title onwards, Glaser simply assumes that S2C works for Talia Zimmerman, as well as for the other non-speakers she mentions in passing.

A January 20th article in the Irish Independent entitled Non-verbal boy from Wexford wrote letter to Taoiseach which touched hearts around the world.

As authors Isabel Colleran and Gorey Guardian explain, the boy in question

used the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) to write a letter to Taoiseach Simon Harris [the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland] after meeting him during the official launch of Gorey Hill School [a school for students with autism]”

This letter was “shared online worldwide because of its heartfelt message.”

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for RPM or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A January 23rd article in the University of Toronto Magazine entitled When Words Won’t Cooperate.

This article discusses how a neuroscientist in the University of Toronto psychology department, Morgan Barense, “aims to crack the mystery of non-speaking autism.” Author Alison Motluk focuses on an autistic person named Isaiah Grewal, who, at age 2, was not only non-speaking, but also not “responding normally when people spoke to him.” This suggests that his language challenges included not just speech but (as is common in profound autism) comprehension. Nonetheless, once introduced to S2C, Isaiah began typing out the typical messages attributed to autistic individuals who are purportedly “unlocked” through FC/RPM/S2C:  messages about his “freedom from prison” and about wanting people to know “that I’m in here.”

Barense, too, seems to have swallowed the FC talking points about autism: namely “that many autistic people who don’t speak may be hindered not by problems of intellect but motor control”, specifically “apraxia.” She plans to use fMRI scans to “look for complex patterns of brain activity that reflect high-level comprehension but do not require motor output. What she’s after sounds to me like a really low-resolution signal that could easily be generated by noticing changes in vocal prosody and recognizing the sounds of familiar words, as opposed to actual comprehension.

Both Barense and Motluk assume that Isaiah’s S2C-generated messages are his own and treat them as reliable, first-hand testimonials about autism.

I asked what autism felt like to him. Via keyboard, he answered, “Like swimming underwater 24-7 because everything feels hard to control.” I asked what he and his friends talk about when they get together online. “We mostly trash talk,” he responded. Then, later, after I’d stopped laughing, he said, “We just like to hang out in the same space and eat pizza.

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A January 30th article in the Westfair Business Journal entitled Cohen Abilis Advancement Center opening in Stamford.

This center, author Gary Larkin reports, includes “enhanced space for Abilis’ Supported Typing/SteP program (“supported typing” being another term for classic, touch-based FC).

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for FC or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

February, 2025

A February 6th article in Yahoo News entitled Spelling to Communicate fundraiser.

This article announces an S2C fundraiser by the nonprofit Angelo's Angels for Communication to support families who patronize the Mind Over Body clinic and to “raise awareness about individuals who use letterboards as an alternative form of communication.” (Both organizations are included in our list of organizations supporting FC/RPM/S2C).

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

April, 2025

An April 10th segment on WLWT News 5 Today (out of Cincinnati) entitled Son of Cincinnati radio personality defying the odds during Autism Acceptance Month.

This segment features an interview with the “well-known Cincinnati radio personality,” Q-102 radio's Jenn Jordan, whose autistic son is “using his platform to defy the odds.” Her son is Jakob Jordan, and his platform involves “communicat[ing] through spelling after being diagnosed with autism and apraxia.” While Jakob sits in silence, Jenn, who is still unable to do S2C with her son and didn’t bring along his S2C “communication partner,” does all the talking. She characterizes apraxia, falsely, as causing a “brain-body disconnect” and a reluctance to try new things. She also states that the intellectual disability Jakob was initially diagnosed with was a “mislabeling.”

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

May, 2025

A May 2nd piece on Jefferson Public Radio entitled Medford psychiatrist’s research into autism and telepathy sparks debate over communication.

This piece showcases Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist Dr. Diane Powell, whose name should be familiar to anyone familiar with the Telepathy Tapes podcast: she’s the podcast’s star scientist. While the piece focuses on Powell and on how she came to believe that non-speakers are telepathic, it’s also, necessarily, an article about RPM/S2C.  That’s because a video-taped RPM/S2C session that Dr. Powell has “watched countless times” is part of what convinced her—or so journalist Justin Higginbottom suggests.

Like the January 10th Disability Scoop piece, this article does acknowledge the controversy surrounding RPM/S2C. Indeed, Higginbottom even speaks, at length, with one of the directors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). But then Higginbottom returns to the usual RPM/S2C talking points (non-speaking autism as involving motor skills deficits that are serious enough that they require a communication partner), and also cites Heyworth et al’s highly problematic Presuming Autistic Communication Competence and Reframing Facilitated Communication article in which it is claimed that 100 peer-reviewed studies have validated FC/RPM/S2C (stay tuned for a later post on that claim). Naturally, he also cites Jaswal et al.’s highly problematic eye-tracking study.

A May 12th article on SILive.com entitled Legacy of Staten Island man who died at 25 cemented with street renaming, as ‘The Changer’ honored.

Here, author Faith Archibald describes how

[t]he corner of Annadale Road and Lorraine Avenue in Annadale now bears the name “Nick D’Amora ‘The Changer’ Way,” honoring Nicholas D’Amora, a 25-year-old Staten Islander who paved the way for non-verbal autistic individuals. 

[D’Amora died in May 2023 of a seizure—a common cause of early death in profound autism.]

Archibald explains that:

Nicholas D’Amora was non-verbal, and overcame challenges utilizing the spelling to communicate method, an innovative approach that his mother said enabled him to express himself and communicate with others.

It’s interesting how, 10 years since its “invention” by Elizabeth Vosseller, S2C is still being described as “innovative” (see also the January 10th Disability Scoop article).

The article then mentions Crimson Rise, one of the S2C-promoting organizations on our growing list, which was purportedly co-founded by D’Amora:

CrimsonRise will also soon open the Nicholas D’Amora Center for Spelling and Advocacy.

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

June, 2025

A June 5th segment on NPR Weekend Edition entitled Two nonverbal actors star in a new opera — with an assist from AI

This article returns us to Jakob Jordan and discusses a musical in which he’s co-starring. When discussing how Jakob communicates, author Jeff Lunden focuses on the novel elements of the technology, which he characterizes simply as a form of AAC, and on the supposed input regarding the technology by “the non-verbal community.” He leaves out the fact that Jakob and other members of the non-verbal community are being facilitated, and their communications therefore likely authored, by their FC/RPM/S2C communication partners.

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A June 10th article in The Oklahoman entitled G-O-S-P-E-L: Oklahoman's ministry plans include his faith and his letterboard

This article trots out the usual apraxia claims, but mixes into them some Christian spiritualism:

Taylor is a non-speaker due to motor apraxia, he is on the autism spectrum ― and he's also taking seminary classes.

At 26, he is studying so that he may share the message of Christ with others, particularly members of the Speller Bros, his friends who are also non-speakers who communicate via letterboards.

"Jesus rescued me from my sin and gave me purpose in life — he wants to do that for everyone," Taylor said, spelling out his thoughts on his letterboard.

"I want people, really non-speakers, to know how much Jesus loves them."

Author Carla Hinton quotes the pro-S2C International Association for Spelling as Communication as claiming that S2C "empowers non-speakers to overcome communication barriers posed by traditional oral communication."

But even an article as spiritually focused as this one can’t resist the ableist celebration of intact intelligence:

"People can know me and find out my thoughts. Before the letterboard, all people didn't see me. Now they know I am smart. It makes all the difference."

Now leaders of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina have suggested that Taylor enroll in the seminary's GO Certificate program. Crucially:

The program offers video-based theological education that students may take at their own pace.

Remote learning has been, and continues to be, much more S2C-friendly than in-person learning has been.

The article notes, incidentally, that Taylor attended the Griffin Promise Autism Clinic—one of many S2C-providing clinics on our growing list.

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A June 23rd piece on local CBS News Boston entitled Nonspeaking Brookline teen with autism Viraj Dhanda will attend MIT

The real headline here is that MIT, like Stony Brook (see the January 23rd article), will soon join our growing list of institutions of higher education that have enrolled non-speakers whose communications are likely being hijacked by their facilitators. That list includes Berkeley, Cal Lutheran, Columbia, Harvard, Oberlin, Penn, Rollins, and Tulane, Vanderbilt, and Whittier.

Once again, we have the ableist rejoicing over intact intelligence:

Although Dhanda is unlike any other MIT applicant, his acceptance letter has proved those who doubted him wrong. Dhanda was diagnosed with autism at two years old. After a variety of therapies, adults believed he had low intellectual ability.

And once again we have, in what surely is a new trend, a focus on the technological details of the device rather than the communication-hijacking elephant in the room:

[W]hen he was 10, it was suggested he use an alternative communication device. Now, at 19, he uses a Lenovo tablet with a regular keyboard to communicate. He types using only his right thumb and produces about eight to 10 words per minute.

Who is the elephant in the room? Who really got into MIT? Video obtained by WBZ-TV, “show[ing] the moment Dhanda was notified of his acceptance,” is suggestive:

"You got in!" his father yelled. "Oh my goodness! Give me a (fist) bump. I'm so proud of you. I'm so, so proud of you. I can't even begin to express it."

The article reports that Dhanda's “favorite subject is math,” and that on the math ACT (an alternative to the SAT) he scored a 35 out of a possible 36 on the math section. This raises red flags about whether the ACT’s accommodations expressly allow letterboards. I haven’t been able to find any mention of letters, boards, typing, or spelling on the ACT website or in its accommodations document), but in a blog post on the pro-S2C I-ASC website, Jennifer Binder-Le Pape lists the ACT as one of three examples of testing companies that allow “laminated letter boards” and “CRPs” (the S2C acronym for “communication partner”). (The other two tests listed here are Pennsylvania’s upper school achievement tests and New York’s high school equivalency exam). Perhaps Binder-Le Pape has heard about these accommodations through word of mouth from the broader S2C community; and perhaps the testing companies themselves prefer to keep mum about this.

Tellingly:

Dhanda plans to take a gap year before he begins taking classes at MIT in the fall of 2026. He and his father will move to Cambridge together.

If Dhanda is using his device independently, why does his father need to move to MIT also? To modify, slightly, what my son said when I told him that his alma mater had admitted an autistic non-speaker who is facilitated by his mother into its graduate program in neuroscience, “Someone’s going to be getting a degree in math from MIT.”

A June 26th article on the University of Minnesota Center for Genomics Engineering website entitled Celebrating Emelia: Science for All

Emelia, 11 years old, is described as “bright, bold, and brilliant,” and as having “a rare genetic mutation known as DDX3X.” She is also subjected to S2C. Steph Kennelly, the author of this article and also the program manager for the Center for Genome Engineering, dismisses the (extremely high) association between DDX3C and intellectual disability, and claims, falsely, that the autism associated with DDX3C causes—you guessed it!—a brain-body disconnect.

Steph Kennelly characterizes Emelia’s S2C-generated output as—you guessed it!—extraordinarily insightful, in particular in her insights about the genetics research happening at the Minnesota Center for Genomics Engineering. And, despite the fact that Emelia’s S2C communication partner comes up repeatedly in another report about Emelia, namely, Episode 7 of the Telepathy Tapes, Kennelly systematically omits any mention of a communication partner in this article—even as she acknowledges Emelia’s participation in the Telepathy Tapes.

No mention, as well, of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

July, 2025

A July 3rd piece on Local 12 News (Cincinnati) entitled My world has opened up': Son of local radio host changes life through tech, therapy

This takes us back once again to Jakob Jordan, his S2C-generated output, and his brain-body disconnect.

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A July 13th episode of Vermont Public Radio’s Rumble Strip show entitled Mark Utter's beautiful mind

This episode is a tribute to a facilitated man who died this past October. Here, once again, autism is characterized not as a cognitive disorder, but as a disorder that locks people in:

Mark Utter was born with a form of autism that made it impossible for him to say what he was thinking for the first 30 years of his life.

Purportedly, Mark was able to learn language just by listening to words, but was only able to express himself through old-school touch-based facilitated communication. People, purportedly, didn’t realize that he was taking in everything all the time.

Host Erica Hellman acknowledges that some agencies recommend against FC, but instead of saying why, tells us that “This is not a story about the controversy; it’s a story about Mark.” She goes on to assure us that Mark had a number of communication partners, that they only lightly touched his elbow, and that they had no control over which letters Mark touched. And she quotes Mark as saying, through FC, that “this light helped to focus him both physically and mentally.”

In other words, like most people, Hellman doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. But as a journalist, she might (like all the other journalists mentioned above) have better informed herself about the power of subtle cues, the fact that having multiple communication partners doesn’t validate FC, and the circular reasoning involved in using FCed messages as evidence that FCed messages are valid.

Instead, she informs us that Mark had paranormal abilities: he could apparently move backwards in time, and can also “condense” time. Through his facilitator, he apparently typed “I can move back in time because of the way my mind holds information.” Earlier I wrote about a synesthesia meme that seems to have penetrated the world of FC/RPM/S2C; I’m now wondering whether another meme is afoot: one about being unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Here are two quotes from the FC-generated memoir attributed to Naoki Higashida (which I originally blogged about here):

For us, one second is infinitely long—yet twenty-four hours can hurtle by in a flash. (Higashida , p. 63)

We who have autism, who are semi-detached from the flow of time…” (Higashida , p. 67)

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for FC or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

A July 16th piece on Good Things Guy (A South African news website) entitled How an ID Application Became a Beacon of Belonging for a Non-Speaking Autistic Son

This article, the first pro-FC/RPM/S2C news story I’ve seen from this part of the world, describes how an autistic non-speaker applied for a South African ID Card using S2C—and how this application was “met with nothing short of heartwarming kindness, patience and inclusiveness.”

No mention of the complete lack of evidence base for S2C or of any of the many health, education, and advocacy groups that have expressed serious concerns about it.

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In subsequent posts, I will elaborate on several of these articles: the ones on neuroscientist Morgan Barense, psychiatrist Diane Powell, musical star Jakob Jordan, and Telepathy Tapes star Emelia.

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As I mentioned, this year was also distinguished by a few articles critical of RPM/S2C, which warrant a short roundup of their own.

April, 2025

An April 23 article in The Cut entitled “I can hear thoughts.”

Here, journalist Elizabeth Weil meets some of the families involved with the Telepathy Tapes and describes what she witnessed first-hand, including purported instances of telepathy that are highly unconvincing. Weil also consults with a mentalist who points out instances of subtle cueing in the S2C-generated communications in the Telepathy Tapes videos.

June 11, 2025

A piece in the i Paper (A UK paper) entitled Our autistic son was manipulated by speech therapists who put words in his mouth

This piece reports on how the parents of a non-speaker were told by staff at his son’s residential school that their 24-year-old son could communicate via a letterboard via a hand-over-hand method that looks just like FC, but which they claimed was different. They called the method “co-construction support” and stated that, unlike FC, it was “initiated by the student taking the support worker’s hand.” This sort of initiation, even if it truly happens, doesn’t rule out facilitator control over letter selection.

Apparently impervious to this possibility, the school told the parents that their son had communicated that he didn’t want to come home for the school vacation. The school also attempted to revoke the parents’ guardianship, claiming that “your son has the capacity to make decisions about consenting to his own care,” and that he “had expressed a wish to live in a different town after college.” To contest this, the parents “paid £23,000 to have Alex independently re-assessed,” confirming his severe intellectual disability and highly limited language skills and emotional development age.

The parents had been skeptical of FC all along. They found the literacy, sentence structures, and vocabulary allegedly coming from Alex, which included such terms as “mental health,” “reassurance,” and “multidisciplinary,” to be “highly improbable,” and suspected facilitator control.  Especially because they were unable to replicate the hand-over-hand FC with Alex when they tried it themselves.

July 16, 2025

A piece on Richmond 6 News entitled Dad jailed after being accused through controversial autism communication method.

This piece recounts yet another instance of false abuse allegations generated through FC (see our FC and the legal system page). Many of them, including this one, involve estranged spouses, one of whom acts as the child’s FC facilitator, and the other of whom, in this case, the father, is skeptical about FC.

The article recounts how the father, Kevin Plantan, was arrested out of the blue “for alleged sex crimes against his own daughter.” Journalist Tyler Layne reports how Plantan’s daughter was introduced to FC in 2020 and later, at the age of 14, produced a typed letter through FC that “accused him of sexual abuse dating back several years.” As Layne quotes Plantan:

"[T]hat was enough for them to arrest me and charge me with four mandatory life sentences of rape and sodomy of a child 13 or under.”

Plantan was promptly jailed for 10 months. But, as Layne reports, when the judge ordered a message-passing test, and the prosecutor learned that the test had a 100% fail rate, she became skeptical, and the mother “felt the risk would be too great” and decided to drop the charges.

This seems to be the typical outcome in such cases: whenever message-passing tests are allowed at trial, charges are dropped, and/or previously unaccepted settlement offers are accepted. In fact, I’m aware of no instances since the early 1990s of message-passing tests actually making it to trial.

Interesting, the article reports that the teachers at Plantan’s daughter’s school had warned against FC as non-evidence based, and that

the school's speech-language pathologist tried supported typing with the child "on multiple occasions" over two years but the attempts were "unsuccessful" and the student could only type "strings of letters."

This makes me wonder how often, when the person doing the facilitation isn’t either a highly suggestible individual, a true FC/RPM/S2C believer, or a parent who, like Jakob Jordan’s mother, still isn’t able to do S2C with her son, the resulting messages are gibberish.

Readers can read more Plantan’s story in  Stuart Vyse’s recent piece in Skeptical Inquirer.

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REFERENCES

Higashida, N. & Mitchell, D. (2013). The Reason I Jump. Random House.