Might non-speaking individuals with autism be brilliant?

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommuniction.org). 

                What if they’ve been wrong, about every single one of them? What if they’re all…brilliant?

The rhetorical question posed by J.B. Handley at the beginning of Spellers—the Spelling to Communicate documercial we reviewed here—is one that reverberates throughout the pro-FC world. How else can we explain the adult-level vocabulary, adult-level sentence structures, adult-level academic and worldly knowledge, and adult-level aesthetic and philosophical insights that spelling on a held-up letterboard appears to unlock in young, minimally-speaking autistics, most of whom have had little formal instruction in literacy or academic knowledge and have appeared to be paying little attention to the world around them?

It turns out that all this time, while we thought he wasn’t listening, he was paying attention to everything.

Or was he?

Minimal speakers with autism are said to have learned Spanish by hearing their siblings practice Spanish homework; physics by overhearing the proceedings of a physics class through the cafeteria wall; current events by listening to NPR; and bookish knowledge by fleeting glances at book pages combined with highly developed peripheral vision[1] and photographic memory[2]. They are said to be extraordinarily attentive, despite appearances to the contrary: able to see what they don’t appear to be looking at and hear what we might assume is too muddled or out of earshot. They are said to be sponges for knowledge and to have extraordinarily capacities for long-term retention.

Of course, as frequenters to this blog well know, there is an alternative explanation: those who hold up the letterboards and prompt the “spellers” are the ones controlling the messages. The adult-level vocabulary, sentence structures, knowledge, and insights are coming from the facilitating adults, not from their minimally-speaking facilitatees.

But the notion that autistic individuals, non-speakers included, have somehow acquired extraordinary skills on their own, without formal instruction, and without appearing to pay attention, has some basis in reality. And by examining that reality and its limits, we can better understand the fallacies behind the FC-friendly understanding of “they’re all brilliant.”

The reality is that some autistic minimal speakers do acquire some extraordinary skills on their own, just not the ones that FC proponents cite; and that some autistic minimal speakers may be considered brilliant, just not in ways that FC proponents say they are.

For example, anecdotes show very young, minimally speaking autistic individuals, without obviously having paid any attention to their environments, seemingly picking up information about where to find specific objects and how to use them. In The Siege, for example, Clara Park recounts her surprise when the minimally-speaking Jessica Park (at around two or three years old) demonstrated that she had learned the remote, back-room location of the house pencil sharpener and what it was used for. When Jessy’s pencil broke, she put it in her mother’s hand and escorted her through three rooms to the sharpener. “I had not known she knew there was a pencil sharpener, let along its location and its purpose,” Park writes. “If she knew this, how much else did she know?” (Park, p. 12). Plenty, as it turns out. Jessy also demonstrated the ability, without instruction, to use a record player (p. 82), to locate C# on the piano (to request that her mother play a specific part of a Mozart sonata) (pp. 80-81), and to categorize polygons (p. 202).

Similar anecdotes show other minimally-speaking autistic children picking out specialized tools like apple slicers from crowded store shelves and then (assuming their parents oblige them with the purchase) using these tools appropriately at home—without any help and seemingly never before having seen them in use. Still other anecdotes show autistic children able to find their way back to locations they were taken to just once or twice before, this time on their own and many weeks later, seemingly without having paid attention to the complex route involved in getting there.

Perhaps the most common anecdotes of autistic self-teaching involve letter and word recognition and spelling skills. Amy Lutz, for example, recounts how her minimally speaking son, at age four, was able to spell phrases like “FBI WARNING” in chalk on the driveway “without ever having been taught.”

Do these anecdotes suggest that autistic individuals have a general ability to pick up facts and skills on their own, often without seeming to pay attention? Are they enough to explain the adult-level vocabulary, sentence structures, academic and worldly knowledge, and aesthetic and philosophical insights that many non-speaking individuals purportedly generate, via FC, starting in their early teens?

Sadly, no.

First, there’s the question of when we’re justified in saying that someone is “seemingly not paying attention.” We can really only say that someone appears not to be paying attention if we’re actually watching them at the moment in question. It’s not that easy to keep constant track what someone is paying attention to, and we tend to underestimate how much we miss. The attention of other people that we’re most aware of is the attention they pay to us while we’re paying attention back to them. It’s much harder to track the attention someone pays to us when we’re not looking, or the attention they pay to things other than us. We see precisely this play out in another of Park’s anecdotes: one in which it’s clear that Jessy must have been sneaking a number of glances at what Park was doing, even if Park wasn’t aware of it:

[W]ith paper and pencil I lay low bedside her—she crayoning on her paper with random scribbles, I doing the same. For a normal adult, scribbling soon palls; after a while I made circles, as well as a face or two and a couple of fish. Elly [Jessy] paid not attention and wen on scribbling.

The next day, however, she did not scribble. She made her first closed figures. Three days after I had made a cross, she made one. (p. 10)

Jessica Park in The Siege

There’s a second problem with the notion that autistic individuals have a general ability to pick up facts and skills on their own. All of the above examples involve very specific sorts of learning: either direct observation (even if it’s observation that goes undetected by others), hands-on exploration, or non-verbal reasoning (spatial and mechanical reasoning). But the overwhelming majority of knowledge and skills can only be learned through a very specific sort of attention: joint attention. This is the sort of attention that is least likely to go unnoticed, because it’s two people attending to the same thing, often consciously so.

So there are two sides to the “seeming inattention” that accompanies so much of non-speaking autism. On the one hand, parents and others can easily exaggerate how pervasive it is and be unaware of how much of the time the child is actually attending to and learning from the environment. On the other hand, “seeming inattention” is an red flag that the child is rarely engaged in those joint attention moments that are so crucial for learning language and verbal knowledge (See What is Joint Attention and How It Relates to FC).

That doesn’t mean that one cannot develop quite an impressive array of skills non-verbally and without joint attention, through direct observation, hands-on exploration, non-verbal reasoning, and seeming inattention. Examples of such skills, seen in many autistic non-speakers include that ability to:

• rapidly complete large jigsaw puzzles based on shape alone, with the pieces turned upside down.
• ace non-verbal, visual pattern-based cognitive assessments like the Ravens Progressive Matrices.
• reproduce complex objects and scenes through drawing or painting, often from memory.
• perform complex arithmetic operations, including long division.
• spell phrases like “FBI WARNING” (without understanding what they mean)

But the knowledge that facilitated individuals are said to have somehow sponged up on their own crucially involve language: whether the spoken language of NPR, Spanish-practicing siblings, and physics through the cafeteria wall, or the written language of books. Not only is there no evidence that non-speaking facilitated individuals have acquired this knowledge (only message-passing tests would establish this); there is also no plausible route to the acquisition of this knowledge, given what we know about the impairments in language comprehension in minimally-speaking autism (see our discussion of comprehension in this post). And while non-speaking autistic child may be able to spell sophisticated phrases like “FBI WARNING”, he is unlikely to understand its meaning.

It’s absolutely possible to have a fully intact, even brilliant mind that is limited only by social deficits and the resulting failure to pick up language. But language limitations limit one’s ability both to access academic and worldly knowledge, and to express aesthetic and philosophical insights.

Many of them may be brilliant, but they are probably not the authors of the “brilliant” messages that FC-proponents attribute to them.

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[1] For a discussion of the limitations on peripheral vision when it comes to reading, see this recent post.

[2] For a discussion of the limitation of photographic memory when it comes to reading, see this post.