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.
Among the authorities she cites is herself. In her professional capacity as a strategy consultant, she says, is it her job “to dive into facts and data when confronted with conflicting opinions.” So that’s what she did, she says, with S2C. And in “examining the evidence,” she has learned that “unfavorable views” of S2C are due to “outdated assumptions about autistic individuals.” She does not cite any facts that support this claim.
She also tells us that her son has “shown” numerous professionals that S2C is effective. She does not describe the nature of this demonstration. Instead, she cites the “increasing number of conferences, nonprofits, universities, and media outlets” that now embrace S2C.
She contrasts these authorities with a “small but vocal group of people who seem determined to shut down these efforts at inclusion by insisting that these forms of communication are somehow illegitimate.” This group, she says, holds “opinions” that they present as “the scientific consensus”—which she claims is “incorrect at best and arguably intellectually dishonest.”
The most relevant scientists among whom to solicit a consensus, of course, are those who study language and communication skills in autism, and those who study assisted communication and the potential for cuing and message control by facilitators. Is there a lack of consensus among the scientists who specialize in these areas, and who know about S2C, about the validity of S2C? I wouldn’t be so sure. Many of them keep quiet—perhaps because they know what happens if they speak up.
Critics of S2C and other variants of FC are routinely accused by proponents of FC of espousing hate and causing harm to individuals with disabilities. Binder-Le Pape is no exception. She cites claims by S2C users that members of the “small but vocal” group of critics have mocked them and hurt their feelings. These claims, of course, are generated by S2C and therefore are only valid if S2C is valid.
But Binder-Le Pape doesn’t go there; instead, she offers consolation to those who have purportedly been harmed by citing the words of civil rights activist James Baldwin. She also cites the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And then she turns to the ten purported myths.
The first is that no research supports S2C. Binder-Le Pape counters this “myth” by claiming the existence of a “growing body” of S2C-supporting research. The only examples she cites—all of them familiar to us at FacilitatedCommunication.org—date back to 2020 and earlier.
First, she cites Elizabeth Torres, an outspoken believer in all forms of facilitated communication who believes that her research supports a reanalysis of autism as a “micro-movement disorder.” Instead of citing Torres’ research directly, however, Binder-Le Pape cites a 2019 interview with the pro-FC organization “Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism.” Torres’ most recent empirical article about micro-movements in autism, however, dates back to 2013, and we critiqued it here two weeks ago. As I discussed, nothing in that article explains the need for the held-up letterboards and hovering prompters that characterize S2C; in fact, in several ways, Torres’ article undermines the case for S2C.
Next, Binder-Le Pape cites Alexis Woolgar’s work on “hidden ability in autism”, which she describes as “us[ing] portable EEGs to measure specific types of brain activity to establish nonspeaking individuals’ complete comprehension of spoken language.” If you follow the link she provides, you discover that this is not a study at all, but rather a research goal:
We would like to learn more about how their brains process spoken words, using brain imaging technologies that are gentle and fast to set up. The aim of our research is to provide a chance for autistic people to demonstrate how well they understand word meanings.
Binder-Le Pape also cites Phase 1 of an actual study by Woolgar’s lab, but, as you can quickly tell from the abstract, the participants were 20 neurotypical children; no study participants were autistic. None of Woolgar’s actual research, in other words, amounts to any evidence of “complete comprehension of spoken language” by nonspeaking individuals, let alone evidence for the validity of S2C.
The one study cited by Binder-Le Pape that actually does purport to find evidence for S2C is Vikram Jaswal’s infamous eye-tracking study. But this article has been critiqued multiple times for flawed assumptions and flawed methodology, for example here and here. To date, no S2C proponent has publicly critiqued these critiques; at least in public, proponents behave as if these critiques don’t exist.
Finally, Binder-Le Pape refers readers to the articles listed on the pro-FC United for Communication Choice (UCC) website. Many of these are not relevant to FC; most are only indirectly relevant. All of the latter have been critiqued on this website, mostly on this page. It’s notable that the most recent study in the UCC database dates to 2022.
So much for the evidence that supports S2C. Nor do Binder-Le Pape’s citations show that long-standing assumptions regarding autism are “outdated.” Some dozen decades after Leo Kanner coined the term, autism is still clinically defined as involving low levels of social engagement and high levels of restrictive/repetitive behaviors. And a growing body of clinical data, including a very recent eye-tracking study, shows that the low levels of social engagement begin in early infancy. This diminished social engagement tracks with autism severity and derails the acquisition of language, such that the sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structures of messages generated through FC are extremely unlikely to have been generated by those who are most commonly subjected to FC.
Binder-Le Pape concludes her discussion of the first “myth,” the purported myth that no research supports S2C, by citing the words of S2C families and S2C users, thus returning to the circular arguments with which she opened her blog post. We know their communications are authentic because they say they are; we know that S2C works because they say it works.