Social emotional learning for everyone, or special interventions for disruptors?

Grit, growth mindsets, social-emotional learning (SEL): these edu-fads are flourishing as never before. The claim, of course, is that non-academic factors ultimately influence academic performance. And who would argue with the idea that how much you persevere and how engaged you are affect how much you learn?

A recent systematic review of growth mindset interventions has not been encouraging:

We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.

But even when we encounter “research” that “shows” that some SEL programs are increasing academic test scores, there's reason for skepticism. After all, SEL activities tend to divert students away from learning activities. 

Before we draw conclusions from efficacy results, we must rule out:

1. The Hawthorne effect

2. The possibility that the extra staffing and investment involved may, independently of any SEL-specific activities, have positive ripple effects on classroom academics

3. The possibility that SELs programs improve academic achievement only inasmuch as they improve classroom behavior.

This last factor strikes me as the most likely reason for the efficacy of those SELs programs that are in fact effective. Disruptive, distracting behavior imposes a tremendous drain on teaching/learning—for perpetrators and victims alike.

But then the question becomes: is having the entire school population participate in weekly/daily SEL programs really the most efficient way to improve the behavior of the specific students who disrupt learning? How about instead doing the following (which I realize is a fantasy wish list):

1. Split the classroom teaching/classroom management positions into two separate jobs.
2. Put teachers up front and classroom managers in back.
3. Give the latter the authority to remove disruptive students (temporarily or for the long term).
4. Offset the expense of extra adults in classrooms with substantially larger class sizes.
5. Spend the money that would have been spent on SEL instruction for the entire student body on special psychiatric and academic services for disruptive students.

A Review of the Movie Spellers: a Documercial for Spelling to Communicate

        “Quiet people have the loudest minds.” Stephen Hawking.

Thousands of nonspeakers around the world are spelling fluently on letterboards and keyboards. They are graduating from regular high schools and colleges. They have had their lives and dreams returned to them. And yet millions remain underestimated and misunderstood. It’s time to start listening.

These are, respectively, the opening and closing title cards of the new movie Spellers, a pro-FC documentary directed by Pat R. Notaro, III and based loosely on J.B. Handley’s Underestimated: An Autism Miracle. (See our review here). The movie’s trailer also includes this quote:

There’s never any doubt in my mind when someone walks into my room that they can and will spell for me. That they can and do want to learn.

The underlying message: all non-speakers have the capacity to spell out sophisticated messages.

Spellers showcases nine individuals, including Handley’s son, who purportedly do just this—thanks to a variant of FC known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C). The movie refers to these individuals as “spellers,” and, for convenience, I’ll do the same. But while the term generally implies conscious spelling by the person who appears to be selecting the letters, I will be making no such assumptions here.

Mostly I’ll be focusing on the speller’s typing sessions. Typing in S2C involves either a held-up stencil board (or boards) through which the speller pokes a pencil (the initial stages of S2C), or a held-up letterboard (the next stage), or a held-up keyboard, or (the final stage) a stationary keyboard. Another key ingredient of S2C, as with all forms of FC, is a facilitator. (S2C practitioners use the term “communication partner”). This person sits or stands next to the speller, holds up the letterboard and, even in the final stage, prompts the speller through voice and gesture.  

In reviewing these sessions, I’ll look at ways in which the facilitators—unwittingly or not—guide the messages attributed to the spellers. I’ll then explore additional clues that betray who’s actually in control. Finally, I’ll look at some characteristics of the spelled-out messages and at some of the underlying contradictions of the broader belief system that encircles S2C.

But I’ll begin my review with the talking heads: the self-styled experts in the field, namely Elizabeth Vosseller and Dara Johnson. Vosseller is a speech-language pathologist who is hailed by her acolytes as the “founder of S2C.” She’s also the source of both the third quote above (“There’s never been any doubt…”) and of the five misleading claims below, which I’ve interleaved with my corrections:

Claim 1: “What we do is we take the movement out of the fine motor of the digits and put it in gross motor of the arm.”

Correction 1: Pointing to letters on a letterboard is a fine motor skill.

Claim 2:  “Speech is 100% motor, language is 100 cognitive. And you can tell they’re in two different areas of the brain. Speech up here, language is down there.”

Correction 2: Language is not 100% cognitive: one can have cognitive disabilities without language disabilities. That’s one reason why IQ tests have verbal and nonverbal subtests. There is, furthermore, no “up here” vs. “down there” separation of speech from language. Speech involves not just the motor cortex, but also a brain region called Broca’s area. Broca’s area is involved in other aspects of language, including the production of written language and sign language.

Claim 3: “All tests of..  language, cognition, academics, IQ require motor. Every single one. So you either have to speak it or do it. You know, put the thing in the thing. Touch this. Touch that. Give me the this. Give me the that. But we never teach the motor. We do not teach the motor.”

Correction 3: Most cognitive assessments do not require motor skills that are lacking in autism. The most likely reason for failing to point, touch, or give during cognitive assessments are problems with comprehension. “Teaching the motor” would not solve this problem.

Claim 4: If a child points to letters at the wrong end of the letterboard, it’s because “there’s a really strong draw to go to that left side of board because he’s been taught all life to start left, go right.”

Correction 4: “Start left, go right” applies to sheets of paper, not to letterboards and keyboards. It does not cause keyboard users to ignore the keyboard’s letter labels and select letters on the left when they intend to select letters on the right. Nor does it cause piano players to mistakenly select low notes before high notes when playing songs. The most likely reason a person selects the wrong letter is that they don’t know which letter is correct.

Moving on to Dara Johnson, PhD, she is an occupational therapist who founded Spellers Center Tampa and the Invictus Academy, a school that uses S2C. The film adds one more credential: Johnson is the co-founder of something called the “Spellers Revolution.” Here’s her claim and my correction:

Claim 5: “The early research was on autism as a cognitive disability… The assumption that individuals right from the get-go who have autism also have a cognitive disability is completely inaccurate. And the reason is because of what’s called apraxia. And apraxia is an inability to perform on demand a specific movement even though it is fully understood. Traditional assessments, neurological testing, academic testing, all focus on pointing, writing, or speaking which all are motor skills.”

Correction 5: Research continues to show that autism is a cognitive disability: specifically a socio-cognitive disability. Some autistic individuals also have a general cognitive disability. On cognitive testing and on what’s involved in language, see above.

Finally, I’d like to address a claim made by Ginnie Breen, the mother of a speller and the chairman of Communication4All:

Claim 6: “Provisions in Title 2 of the ADA say that people with communication disorders have the right to equal communication of their choosing in schools.”

Correction 6: As far as communication goes, what Title 2 of the ADA actually says is this: “The ADA requires state/local governments to communicate as effectively with people with disabilities as with others.” For effective communication with deaf people, for example, they suggest sign language interpreters.

Now let’s turn to the spelling sessions and the ways in which the facilitators—unwittingly or not—guide the messages attributed to the spellers. In the dozen or so S2C sessions showcased in Spellers, we see the facilitators exerting control in the following ways:

1.      Board movements: In all sessions in which the facilitator holds up the letterboard or keyboard, the board is never stationary. Generally, it moves in directions that shorten the distance between the speller’s extended index finger or pencil and whichever letter is subsequently deemed to have been selected. Many of these movements are relatively small and therefore are only part of how facilitators control letter selection. But there’s one major exception: when the facilitator decides to “reset” the board. Resetting involves whisking the letterboard away from the speller and then thrusting it back. This typically happens when the speller is deemed to have lost focus, or (more insidiously) has chosen, or is about to choose, the wrong letter. When the facilitator thrusts the board back, it’s often to a location that brings the targeted letter closer to the speller’s finger or pencil than it was before the reset. Finally, facilitators can whisk away the letterboard once and for all in order to end a message—and often they do this without appearing to check in with the spellers to see if they’re actually done spelling.

2.      Vocal and gestural cues: Throughout most of the S2C sessions, we hear a variety of phrases come out of the mouths of the facilitators. Different phrases co-occur with different speller behaviors. We hear:

• “Keep going” and/or “Go, go, go” when the speller is moving towards the correct letter.

• “Go for it,” “You got this,” or “Get it, get it, get it,” “Which one g or b?” or “Pick whichever one you want” when the speller is close to the correct letter.

• “Get it,” “Yeah,” or “Mm-hmm” when the speller has reached the correct letter but hasn’t yet selected it.

• “Mm-hmm,” “That makes sense,” “Real good,” or a reading back of the letter when the speller selects the correct letter.

• “What makes sense?”, “Move your eyes,” “Get your eyes down,” “Open your eyes,” “Keep going,” “Hmm?”, “Oop,” “No, that doesn’t make sense,” or a repeating of the correct letters selected so far when the speller is about to select, or has selected, the wrong letter.

• “Keep going,” “You’re good,” “Go ahead”, or “and...” when the speller still has letters left to go, particularly if he or she is getting restless or is perseverating on the current letter.

In addition, when the camera angle permits it, we sometimes see the facilitator’s free hand move in the direction that the speller’s hand needs to move in order to hit the correct letter. 

3.      Ignoring or dismissing incorrect letter selections

• Across the various S2C sessions, we see numerous occasions where a letter that was clearly selected is ignored by the facilitator—not said out loud, and not incorporated into the facilitator’s transcription or pronunciation of the word or message.

• In some cases, the facilitator makes an explicit correction (“i-o” doesn’t make sense”) or adjustment (“f-a-s-s? Oh: a-s-s-“)

• In one case, after a speller selects t-e-b-a-c-h-e-r-s, the facilitator says “teachers?”, looks at the speller, and then, as if she’d obtained some sort of confirmation, nods her head and repeats “teachers”.

4.      Interrupting the spelling. We’ve seen one way in which facilitators interrupt letter selection: whisking the letterboard away in order to “reset” it or terminate a message. The board may also be whisked away and replaced with one of three smaller boards that each display only a third of the alphabet. During one of the sessions, on three occasions when the speller’s selection was unclear or incorrect, the facilitator does just this. In addition to reducing by two-thirds the number of incorrect selections, this opens up additional opportunities for placing the target letter closer to the speller’s finger or pencil. Another tactic is simply to intercept the finger or pencil—something that Dawnmarie Gaivin, the facilitator for the majority of the movie’s S2C sessions, does several times. Interruptions that aren’t obviously motivated—e.g., by a loss of focus or a need for clarification—cry out for some sort of justification, and Gaivin obliges:

• Twice when intercepting a speller’s hand and pencil (when there was no obvious problem with how he was holding it), she tells the speller to “hold the pencil like that.”

• Once after whisking away the board and requisitioning the pencil, she sets the board down and uses the pencil to transcribe what the speller had spelled out earlier (omitting the nonsensical letter sequence that he had most recently selected). What may at first glance seem inconvenient (sharing a pencil with a speller) may actually prove convenient.

• On two other occasions, she immediately follows the interruption by directing the speller to up look at her eyes (echoing a tactic used in evidence-based therapies, but whose application to S2C remains unclear).  

Especially exemplary of much of this is the first of the S2C sessions, which starts about 4 minutes into the movie and involves a pencil and a stencil board. Here’s a breakdown of what happens after the speller is asked by Gaivin, who also facilitates, what he thinks of using the board:

• With continuous prompts from Gaivin to “keep going” and “move your eyes”, the speller selects g-q-r-e.

• Gaivin, ignoring the “q”, says “g-r-e, what makes sense?”

• The speller selects “k”

• Gaivin whisks away the board, says “look at me,” and points to her nose. Gaivin then resets the board.

• The speller selects “a.”

• Before he can select another letter, Gaivin puts down the board, takes his pencil, and transcribes “g-r-e-a”.  She then resets the board and hands back his pencil.

• The speller selects “t”.

• Gaivin repeats back “great.”

• With some pauses and oral prompts and board shifting, the speller selects l-i-f-e.

• Gaivin repeats back “great life”.

• Then the speller selects i-o-j

• Gaivin, ignoring the “j”, repeats back “i-o… doesn’t make too much sense.” She takes away the pencil, puts down the board, and transcribes “great life.”

• Gaivin then hands back the pencil, says “i”, resets the board, says “Start at i.”

• The speller hesitates.

• Gaivin points to “i” and repeats “start at i. So I know that”.

• The speller follows her index finger to the “i”. He then selects “s.”

• Gaivin immediately says “is”.

• The speller then starts to point somewhere on the board with his pencil

• Gaivin immediately whisks the board up and resets it.

• The speller selects “g” and then another letter (the film cuts to a different camera and so we can’t see which one).

• Gaivin immediately whisks away the board, tells him to “start at g” and briefly cups his fist.

• The speller selects “g” twice and then “j”.

• Gaivin shakes her head and says, “Make it make sense, g-j doesn’t make sense” and moves her free hand towards the middle of the board.

• The speller points to “g” again and then hits “s.”

• Gaivin takes his pencil, puts the board down and says, while ostensibly transcribing it, “Great life is.” She then resets the board and tries to give him back the pencil.

• The speller is now looking down at his hands.

• Gaivin says “Trust yourself—I love that. Great life is…”

• The speller takes the pencil and pokes it towards the board.

• Gaivin whisks up, points to her nose again, and says “Look at me for a sec… can you put your eyes up?” Then she resets the board.

• The speller selects “a.”

• Gaivin says, as if surprised at this new letter selection, “oh, a”.

• With continuous vocal prompts from Gaivin, which crescendo as he approaches the final letter, the speller selects h-e-a-d.

• Gaivin pronounces “Great life is ahead” while putting the board down.

• The mother bursts into tears.

Consistent with facilitator control, there are a number of signs that the facilitators in Spellers, at least subconsciously, know what the messages are before they’re spelled out. For one thing, they behave as if they know when they’re about to end—e.g., by reassuring the speller that they’re “almost done”, or by setting aside the letterboard immediately after what they deem to be the final letter selection, without confirming this with the speller. How did Gaivin know that “great life is ahead” stopped there, instead of continuing, say, with the words “of me”, or “of me and I’m really looking forward to it”?

In addition, the facilitators sometimes display an extraordinary ability to hold long chunks of letters and incomplete phrases in their heads and then recite the entire message from memory once they consider it finished. For example, J.B. Handley, after extracting, bit by bit, the first half of a message (“I want to tell my future”, with “future” spelled f-u-t-t-r) somehow holds in his head the subsequent letter sequence, s-e-l-f-t-o-n-e-v-e-r-g-i-v-e-u-p-o-n-t-h-e-o-t-h-e-r-n-o-n-s-p-e-a-k-e-r-s, even while punctuating it here and there with “go ahead” and “and then.” As soon as he reaches that final “s”, Handley immediately and accurately reproduces the entire message: “I want to tell my future self never to give on other nonspeakers.”

Gaivin, accomplishing a similar mnemonic feat, suggests that she at least is aware of its potential implausibility. When she recites, from memory, “sensory stimuli assault my body constantly, brushes help me feel my hands,” she holds up the letterboard as if to suggest that she’s somehow reading the message off of the board.

Of course, it’s easier to reproduce a message that originated from your own mind rather than the mind of the person you’re facilitating.

As for the spellers, there are indications, not only that they aren’t the originators of the messages, but also that they aren’t even attending to the spelling process and often find it aversive. We see attempts to get up, or at least to cease spelling, smack in the middle of messages or, even, of words; we see one speller consistently look away from the board; we see spellers getting up as soon as facilitators put down the boards, completely uninterested in the effects their messages have on their audience. We see spellers stimming, fidgeting, pounding the table, and, in one case, even speaking while spelling. (Yes, some of these “non-speakers” can speak). Some of this speller’s words are probably echolalic (“I can see you”; “uh-oh try again”; “quiet”; “who is crying”), but others are clearly communicative (“I’m sad”, “I want Mama”), which raises two questions. How is this person able to switch back and forth between distinct messages, one spelled and others spoken? And why is she being forced to spell to communicate—especially since she bursts into tears and weeps extensively while spelling?

Initially, her facilitator (Gaivin again) interprets her distress as part and parcel of the message that was extracted from her: “Yeah, I’m going to guess that some of your emotions right now are because of that experience,” Gaivin adds: “You can tell me if that’s true or not. I could be projecting.” (We don’t see the speller get an opportunity to do that; the film instead cuts to her parents discussing what a hard time she had in school.) Later, we’re told that she “advocated to redo the interview”, and in the do-over, the extracted message downgrades the earlier spoken messages as “scripting”: “I was embarrassed by my scripting”. Who exactly was embarrassed, we might wonder.

Another source of wonder is the difficulty that many of the spellers display in locating specific letters on letterboards, even after months of practice. In one striking instance, while in the middle of spelling “all”, one person, having just selected the first “l”, moves his pencil away from the “l” and has to circle around again to relocate it. Proponents claim that S2C bypasses the motor challenges, so there must be some other culprit. What could it possibly be?

What about the wonder of messages slowly emerging from the fingers of non-speakers, serene music playing in the background, anxious parents waiting in suspense? In the context in which they unfold in Spellers, it’s easy to miss how many of these messages amount to bland promotions of S2C and of all that non-speakers can presumably achieve as a result of it:

• Now I’m going to change the reality for myself and others.

• I think knowing that we are intelligent and treating us with respect helps.

• Teachers need to stop underestimating autistics; they need to start presuming up again and again.

• I’d love to advocate for S2C in schools.

Following in their kids’ footsteps, many of the parents featured in Spellers now have practices that promote FC, some of which are mentioned in Spellers:

• Dawnmarie Gaivin, a parent as well as a facilitator, is the founder of Spellers Center, San Diego.

• Jennifer Larson is the founder of Holland Autism Center and Clinic and the CEO of the partner organization Holland Spellers.

• Vaishnavy Sarathy, PhD runs a program focused on autism and nutrition that also promotes S2C.

• Ginnie Breen, is the chairman of the board of the pro-FC organization Communication 4 All.

Thus, subtract away the mystique, and what Spellers amounts to is one giant infomercial for Spelling to Communicate.

One giant infomercial that’s filled with misinformation, misleading footage, and, finally, a few problematic convictions:

• We hear parents lamenting the absence of reliable communication prior to their discovery of S2C. But Spellers shows numerous instances of reliable communication, some of it oral (“All done”; “I’m sad”) some of it gestural (those displays of distress and attempts to terminate the S2C sessions).

• We hear some parents lament that science hasn’t caught up to S2C, seemingly unaware that S2C practitioners resist empirical testing. We hear others, including one self-professed scientist, state that they don’t care about the science.  Finally, in what is perhaps the most revealing statement of all on this topic, one parent states “There should be academic literature focused strictly specifically on this area to help promote it”: an astonishing confusion of academics with advocacy.

• One parent asks what people could possibly gain by perpetrating the hoax that FC skeptics claim that S2C is. Tragically, there’s plenty to gain, not the least of which are false hopes, even if there’s far more to lose.

• Finally, there’s the issue of seeing vs. believing. On one hand, we’re not supposed to make assumptions about someone’s intelligence based on what we see when we observe them: as Vaishnavy Sarathy puts it, we should assume intelligence, “whether that intelligence is on display or not.” On the other hand, we are supposed to believe what we see when we watch the spellers spelling, because (assuming we don’t observe too closely) S2C can look pretty convincing. As J.B. Handley facilitates out of his son, “You just need to open your eyes.”

But perhaps the most problematic statement of all comes from S2C’s founder. When I quoted Vosseller in Claim 1 at the beginning of this review, I did not include the follow-up sentence. I conclude this review with the full quote:

What we do is we take the movement out of the fine motor of the digits and put it in gross motor of the arm. Because that’s so much easier to control.

Indeed it is. The question is who’s doing the controlling.

Should we be teaching grammar rules to native speakers?

Here are some thoughts, from one of my vanished Out in Left Field posts, on K12 writing instruction. What seems to predominate in K12 is neither:

• useful, explicit grammar instruction that facilitates the understanding of style rules (dangling modifiers, parallel structures), foreign language grammar, and complex sentences in English

nor:

• opportunities for implicit learning that come from expert feedback on multiple drafts.

In terms of writing, the results of this are evident in student papers, in written instructions, in promotional materials, and even in published articles and their associated headlines.

What keeps most of us complacent about this are two phenomena

1. to some extent, it’s mostly the good writers who recognize bad writing for what it is (keeping the general malaise about the state of writing in this country in equilibrium)

2. there will always be a decent number of decent, self-taught writers: people who read enough high-quality prose to pick up the conventions; people who write intuitively by ear.

It occurs to me that, besides the false choice between part-of-speech drills and peer editing, there’s a second fallacy afoot. People forgot that, when it comes to native speakers, only certain aspects of grammar need to be taught. No native English speaker needs to be taught how to conjugate English verbs or form the comparatives and superlatives of English adjectives—and yet, I’ve seen this happen.

Self-taught writers aside, what English speakers need to be taught isn’t the syntax of their native language, but how to make active use of that syntax: call it “applied syntax.” One example of applied syntax is identifying and fixing dangling modifiers and un-parallel structures. Another is deploying options like active vs. passive voice (“I was astounded by his tone”), clefting (“what particularly astounded me was his tone”), and inversion (“particularly astounding to me was his tone”) to control emphasis and flow.

A final post on autism-related challenges that are supposed to explain away our concerns about FC: motor control, echolalia, and word retrieval

In two recent posts, I discussed what we know about motor difficulties, intentional control difficulties, and apraxia in autism. As we saw, such difficulties neither justify the need for FC, nor explain why facilitated individuals (a) sometimes pronounce words that are at odds with their facilitated typing and (b) demonstrate cognitive skills during neuropsychological evaluations that are well below the cognitive skills they show when they’re being facilitated.

To recap:

• There is no empirical evidence that the motor difficulties in autism include difficulties with pointing.

• Language assessments that prompt autistic individuals with motor difficulties to point to things, therefore, do not underestimate their receptive language skills.

• Apraxia of speech (AOS) cannot be diagnosed in minimal speakers: AOS involves difficulty consistently producing combinations of vowels and consonants, and the smaller a child’s consonant and vowel repertoire, the harder it is to detect these difficulties and inconsistencies.

• There is no evidence of a “motor disinhibition” problem in autism (or in any other condition) that causes people to point to item A when they want to point to item B, to say the word “yes” when they intend to say “no”, to throw random objects instead of cleaning up, or to follow a multi-step procedure unless they type it out first.

• In autism, gross motor problems are about as prevalent as fine motor problems, so converting a fine motor task into a gross motor task does not, as a general rule, result in a more accessible, autism-friendly task.

• Pointing is fine motor, not gross motor.

In this post, I’ll say one more thing pertaining to motor difficulties, and then I’ll turn to two other autism-related challenges that are supposed to explain away some of the concerns about FC: echolalia and word-retrieval difficulties.

The “one more thing” is a new set of findings that was presented this month at the annual INSAR (International Society for Autism Research) conference by Dr. Yanru Chen, a postdoctoral associate at Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Chen’s team looked at a sample of 1579 minimally speaking autistic children drawn from two large-scale research databases. They found that minimally speaking autistic children had much lower receptive language skills (comprehension skills) compared to their neurotypical peers, that this gap widened with age, and that receptive language skills correlated with social skills (and thus, inasmuch as social deficits are a core symptom of autism, that receptive language skills correlated with autism severity).

They also found, however, that there exists a subset of minimal speakers (about 25%) in which receptive language skills are relatively high relative to expressive skills (e.g., speaking skills). And if you’re an FC supporter, you might now be thinking:

Ah hah! This validates what’s going on with non-speakers who can type out “herbivore” or “amber” on a held-up letterboard in answer to questions about the opposite of carnivore or the name for fossilized tree resin.

However, as Chen et al’s presentation adds, the receptive language skills even of this unusual subgroup:

• are still lower than those of non-autistic individuals

• are positively associated with motor skills.

That is, as Chen puts it:

[I]n this subgroup, motor skills emerge as the only significant factor predicting the discrepancies between receptive and expressive language above and beyond all other factors. And those with better motor skills are more likely to have much better receptive language than expressive language.

What this means is that those who are supposedly most in need of FC—i.e., because of their purported motor difficulties—also have the worst receptive language skills… And that it’s unlikely that people who rely on FC/RPM/S2C know the meanings of words like “carnivore” and “amber” when they type them.

Now let’s turn to claims about reflexive language and echolalia. These claims, going back decades, are supposed to explain what’s going on with people who say “Popcorn! Popcorn” while conversing through FC about the nature of language, or people who say “No more! No more!” while describing a close relationship. Such spoken utterances are routinely dismissed by FC proponents as meaningless, reflexive uses of language—as opposed to the FCed messages, which are, purportedly, authentic communication.

What is the evidence for meaningless, reflexive uses of language in autism? The best candidate is echolalia. Echolalia, indeed, is sometimes considered merely reflexive. But it is often considered meaningful, as when a child echoes someone else’s “Do you want a cookie?” as a request for a cookie (Kim et al., 2014; Xie et al., 2023).  Prizant and Rydell (1984), analyzing the role of delayed echolalia in 3 autistic individuals, enumerated a host of purposeful uses, including self-direction, labeling, turn-taking, providing information, affirming, request, protesting, directing, and rehearsing (repeating something in order to keep it in memory). In the only study I’ve encountered that suggests that echolalia is merely reflexive, it occurs as an immediate echo of whatever was last said (Grossi et al., 2013). But, in the context of FC, “Popcorn! Popcorn!” and “No more! No more!” are not immediate echoes of what was just said.

Another possibility is that “Popcorn! Popcorn!”, “No more! No more!”, along with other spoken utterances that clash with the FCed messages they coincide with, are verbal perseverations. Temple Grandin, for example, reports shouting out the “prosecution” because she liked how it sounded. Another child might repeat “You must not hit” as a way to regulate his behavior (Wevrick, 1986). But deliberately repeating something to fulfill a conscious goal is different from echoing words as a non-deliberate reflex. Saying something deliberately should interfere with your ability to simultaneously type out an unrelated message: give it a try and see what happens! It ought to interfere, that is, unless you’re not the one directing your typing.

Finally, let’s turn to word-retrieval difficulties. These are supposed to explain both the need for prompting and the failure of FC during message-passing tests. Prompting purportedly helps the person retrieve words they might not be able to retrieve in a timely fashion on their own. And message passing tests supposedly involve stressful environments that aggravate word-retrieval difficulties, such that these difficulties are what cause message-passing failures. (Somehow those being facilitated have consistent word-retrieval difficulties only when testers ask them to identify a picture or object that their facilitators weren’t shown, and somehow those word-retrieval difficulties can occasionally cause the facilitated person to type out what the facilitator saw instead of what they saw).

But while there is some evidence that autistic individuals are slower to retrieve words than their non-autistic counterparts, (see Hartley et al., 2020), there’s no evidence for higher rates of word retrieval failure in autism. In addition, as Jacobson et al. (1995) and Vázquez (1995) point out, when people fail to retrieve words, they compensate via circumlocution. That is, if you can’t call up the word “key”, you might say “thing that goes in a lock.” Such circumlocutions, Jacobson et al. add, have almost never occurred during message-passing tests.

Thus, when an individual with autism is unable to name or describe an object, the most likely explanation is that they don’t know the relevant words, not that they can’t retrieve them. (And, if what’s going on is a message-passing test, that their facilitator is the one directing the messages).

To recap:

• Most minimal speakers, including those with the greatest motor control difficulties, have limited receptive language skills. This undermines claims that FC unlocks significant language skills that are locked in by motor difficulties.

• When a facilitated person speaks words that clash with what they’re simultaneously typing, those utterances are most likely deliberate and should interfere with the typing process, assuming the typing is independent.

• Word-retrieval difficulties in autism do not explain away message-passing failures.

REFERENCES:

Grossi, D., Marcone, R., Cinquegrana, T., & Gallucci, M. (2013). On the differential nature of induced and incidental echolalia in autism. Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 57(10), 903–912. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2788.2012.01579.x

Hartley, C., Bird, L. A., & Monaghan, P. (2020). Comparing cross-situational word learning, retention, and generalisation in children with autism and typical development. Cognition, 200, 104265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104265

Jacobson, J. W., Mulick, J. A., & Schwartz, A. A. (1995). A history of facilitated communication: Science, pseudoscience, and antiscience science working group on facilitated communication. American Psychologist, 50(9), 750–765. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.50.9.750

Kim, S. H., Paul, R., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Lord, C. (2014). Language and communication in autism. In F. Volkmar, R. Paul, S. J. Rogers, & K. A. Pelphrey (Eds.), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 232–363). Wiley., doi:10.1002/9781118911389.hautc10

Prizant, B. M., & Rydell, P. J. (1984). Analysis of functions of delayed echolalia in autistic children. Journal of speech and hearing research, 27(2), 183–192. https://doi.org/10.1044/jshr.2702.183

Vázquez C. A. (1995). Failure to confirm the word-retrieval problem hypothesis in facilitated communication. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 25(6), 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02178190

Wevrick, P. (1986). The Role of Echolalia in Children with Various Disorders. Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.

Xie, F., Pascual, E., & Oakley, T. (2023). Functional echolalia in autism speech: Verbal formulae and repeated prior utterances as communicative and cognitive strategies. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 1010615. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1010615

The imperiled pleasures of parsing Austen

How many of today's middle school students (or older students), I wonder, can properly parse the second sentence in the excerpt below?

(Quick background: "she" refers to Elizabeth; Jane is Elizabeth's sister; Elizabeth has been away from home; Longbourn is the name of Jane and Elizabeth's home; Jane is in love with Mr. Bingley).

(More background, plus spoiler alert: Mr. Darcy has recently proposed to Elizabeth and explained to her how he talked Mr. Bingley out of pursuing Jane).

It was not without an effort, meanwhile, that she could wait even for Longbourn, before she told her sister of Mr. Darcy's proposals. To know that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish Jane, and must, at the same time, so highly gratify whatever of her own vanity she had not yet been able to reason away, was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate; and her fear, if she once entered on the subject, of being hurried into repeating something of Bingley which might only grieve her sister farther.

Here's a pop quiz:

Part I: Grammar

What is the main verb of the italicized sentence?
What is the subject of that verb?
What is its object?
Write out the full subject of "could have conquered."

Part II: Comprehension 

What is Elizabeth tempted to do and why?
Which factors are deterring her from doing it?

Complicating this sentence are:

(1) the now-unconventional use of the comma, which separates the subject from the main verb
(2) the now-unconventional use of the semi-colon to separate noun phrases rather than verbal clauses
(3) the out-of-date use of "such … as" instead of "that" in marking a relative clause

and… last but not least:

(4) the multiple embedding in both subject and predicate, which I've marked off by brackets below:

To know [that she had the power of revealing what [would so exceedingly astonish Jane], and [must, [at the same time], so highly gratify [whatever of her own vanity she had not yet been able to reason away]], was such a temptation to openness as [nothing [could have conquered] but [the state of indecision [in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate]]; and [her fear, [if she once entered on the subject], of [being hurried into repeating [something of Bingley [which might only grieve her sister farther]]]]].

Despite the persistence of Pride and Prejudice in classroom curricula and recommended reading lists, how many of today's teachers are providing the direct instruction that many students need, at least at first, to comprehend fully such sentences as this one?

Here's one way one might go about guiding students towards comprehension.

First, start with a much simpler sentence that gives the general shape:

Knowing this thing was a temptation to openness that nothing but indecision and fear could have conquered.

Next:
-- replace the clausal subject –ing ending with the more old fashioned infinitive (“knowing” -> “to know”)
--flesh out a bit more the object of “know”
--replace the more modern relativize clause marker “that” (“a temptation that”) with the more old-fashioned “such…. as” (“such a temptation as”)
--extrapose the “but a state of indecision and her fear” away from “nothing” to the end of the sentence:

To know that she had the power of revealing this was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have conquered but a state of indecision and her fear.

Next:
--flesh out a bit the object of “reveal”
--add modifiers to “state of indecision” and “her fear”:

To know that she had the power of revealing what would astonish Jane and gratify herself was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision in which she remained, and her fear of being hurried into something.

Next:
--add qualifiers to “astonish” and "gratify"
--flesh out a bit more the object of “gratify”
--place a comma between the subject and the main verb:

To know that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish Jane, and must, at the same time, gratify her own vanity, was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision in which she remained, and her fear of being hurried into something.

Finally:
--flesh out "her own vanity" with embedding and modifiers;
--add a modifier to "remained";
--place a conditional appositive after "her fear";
--change the comma before "her fear" to a semi-colon:

To know that she had the power of revealing what would so exceedingly astonish Jane, and must, at the same time, gratify whatever of her own vanity she had not yet been able to reason away, was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision in which she remained as to the extent of what she should communicate; and her fear, if she once entered on the subject, of being hurried into repeating something of Bingley which might only grieve her sister farther.

Perhaps I'd be surprised at the number of kids who could pass my pop quiz without help. But, in this age of student-centered discovery in the classroom and record-low levels of independent reading, particularly of pre-20th century literature, at home, I'm guessing that more students than ever are stymied by these wonderful 19th century sentences, and, caught up in a couple of vicious cycles, increasingly shut off from much of what makes the classics so much fun to read.