From proto-syntax to actual syntax

Many minimally verbal, severe-to-moderately autistic individuals are able to pick up, with little to no instruction, what we might call “proto-syntax”: namely, how to put nouns, verbs, and adjectives together in an order that reflects the word order rule of their native languages—whether through speech, written words, or pictures.  For English, this means putting the subject noun before the verb and the object noun after the verb:

• I want cookie.
• Daddy push truck.

At the two-word level, proto-syntax includes the “telegraphic speech” evinced not just by language-delayed autistic individuals, but by typically developing two year olds:

• Truck red.
• Mommy come.

Some people equate this sort of basic content-word ordering with actual syntax: after all, it implicitly encodes which noun is the subject and which noun is the object. But actual syntax involves so much more than how to order subject and object nouns into simple sentences.

Actual syntax involves not just content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions) but also verb tense endings, auxiliary verbs, and function words like articles (“a” and “the”) or, in certain contexts, words like “by” or “that.”

Actual syntax involves noun phrases, not just bare nouns: phrases that include not just the noun, but, at the very least (where English is concerned), an accompanying article. It’s what allows you to refer to “the truck” (a specific truck that’s familiar to both speaker and listener) vs. “a truck” (a novel or unspecified truck).

And actual syntax allows for sentence transformations, for example passive voice, in which the subject and object nouns are switched and a specific auxiliary verb and a specific function word are inserted into specific slots in the sentence. For example, in the sentence below, “truck” now comes first, but it is still the object, not the subject, of the verb “push.”

• The truck was pushed by Daddy. [Here I’ve highlighted, in order: an article, an auxiliary verb, a tense ending, and a function word.]

Actual syntax also involves not just linear sequences, but structure, or groupings of words. Syntactic structure is what differentiates the two meanings of

• He talked about sex with Dick Cavett.

Syntactic structure what tells you that “who” is the subject of “vanish” but the object of “banish” in this pair:

• Who do you want to vanish?
• Who do you want to banish?

And syntactic structure is what tells you that “he” can refer to “John” in the first and second sentences, but not in the third:

• John keeps saying that he is smart.
• It's that he's smart that John keeps saying.
• He keeps saying that John is smart.

Besides syntactic structure, there are syntactic rules. These tell you, for example, how to map basic statements into questions:

• She is sleeping to Is she sleeping?
• She slept to Did she sleep? (NOT Slept she? or Did she slept?)
• She sleeps to Does she sleep? (NOT Sleeps she? Or Does she sleeps?)

Actual syntax, in fact, has so much going on that it takes at least two semesters of advanced linguistics courses focused specifically on syntax to really appreciate what all is involved.

That said, actual syntax is not just an arcane subject for linguists, nor a sort of icing on the linguistic cake for those who are able to sequence bare nouns and verbs into basic subject-verb-object sentences. Actual syntax is the structural backbone of language and the semantic backbone of meaningful communication. It’s what allows people to express statements that go beyond the immediate here and now to the past, future, hypothetical, and counterfactual. It’s what allows reminiscences, future planning, problem solving, and precautions (“if you run into the street without looking, you might get hit by a car”). It’s what allows you to not just answer other people’s questions (which is how so many autistic individuals spend so much of their instructional hours), but to ask questions of your own.

Indeed, so important is the ability to ask questions that two prominent autism researchers, Lynn Koegel and Robert Koegel, have specifically targeted this skill as a pivotal skill that, when explicitly instructed, helps individuals with autism improve upon their conversational initiation skills—an area of significant and widespread difficulty in autism.

For me in particular, with my linguistic connections to syntax and, more importantly, my personal and professional connections to autism, syntax is so important that I’ve devoted over a decade of my professional life to developing the only software tool that teaches the full gamut of expressive syntax skills to individuals with autism.

It’s easy to underestimate what goes into such a tool—especially given the number of apps that teach one or another tiny subset of the skills involved in forming the most basic of sentences. A software tool that teaches all of the syntactic phenomena of English, with enough exercises for instruction, practice, and generalization, requires hundreds of pages of complex linguistic processing code, and thousands of pages of lesson code, developed over years of beta-testing with individuals at multiple levels of syntactic development.

Here’s just a tiny a sample of what that translates into in practice:

https://autism-language-therapies.com/HTML5/Demo1.html

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part II

(Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

This post continues my critique of Jennifer  Binder Le-Pape’s recent blog post on the official Spelling to Communicate (S2C) website. This piece, as I noted earlier, 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. Last time I showed how this plays out in her first 5 purported myths; I pick up here at Myth 6.

Myth 6, per Binder-Le Pape, is that “It is dangerous to presume competence; an individual should prove that they are authentically communicating before participating in a public forum.” Here, Binder-Le Pape cites the legal system, which, she says, “presumes adults to be competent unless proven otherwise.” This would make it legally impermissible to assess people for competence. After all, if we’re required to presume competence, then presumably we shouldn’t be assessing it. But most of us recognize that evaluations of competence are sometimes necessary.

Standard evaluations of competence are psychological evaluations, which are supposed to be conducted without facilitators facilitating. Binder-Le Pape claims that “many individuals have undergone rigorous evaluations, only to be repeatedly questioned by detractors who demand a repeat performance or an additional one based on their preferred method.” She does not tell us what these rigorous evaluations entailed.

Myth 7, per Binder-Le Pape, is “Using prompts in the early stages of learning to use S2C renders it invalid.”  This one is a straw man. Many people recognize that prompts are needed in the early stages of learning.  The key question is whether those prompts are faded. Binder-Le Pape cites applied behavioral analysis (ABA), but here’s what ABA guidelines have to say about prompting.

Once the child has learned to touch one of two items held in front of him, training should be given on learning to touch one of two items placed on a table. The procedure is similar, but this type of trial is often a little more difficult for a child because it eliminates most inadvertent prompts (e.g., slight position, movement, or eye prompts).

(From Sundberg and Partington’s ABA-based Teaching Language to Children with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, italics mine).

Unlike S2C, which has no such guidelines, ABA makes a distinction between teaching prompts and inadvertent prompts, has protocols for fading inadvertent prompts as soon as possible, and recognizes the potential of slight movements, including eye gaze, to direct a client’s responses.

Myth 8: “Using S2C or related methods to take standardized tests automatically invalidates their results.” Here what constitutes debunking, for Binder-Le Pape, is simply to list the testing organizations that allow “communication and regulations partners” and “hand-held S2C laminated letterboards.” According to Binder-Le Pape, these include New York’s TASC (its GED or high school equivalency test), Philadelphia’s Keystone, and the ACT. (When I search “laminated letterboard” plus “Keystone”/”TASC”/”ACT”, nothing comes up). She also suggests that the guidelines for two IQ tests—those of the WAIS-IV, which make reference to “preferred mode of accommodation”, and those of the WISC-V, which allude to “clinical judgment” about “modification”—permit this type of “accommodation”.

Myth 9: “Some individuals have made false or unproven accusations using methods similar to S2C, and therefore, no one using these methods should be believed.”  This one is another straw man. The false abuse accusations are one of many problems with FC, but that does not, in and of itself, mean that people using these methods should not be believed. When someone makes a false accusation via FC, the first step should be a rigorous authorship test. Interestingly, these days when judges order such tests, the response has generally been to drop charges—which is quite suggestive of what the people facilitating those charges know, deep down inside, about what rigorous authorship testing would reveal.

Myth 10 is a rhetorical question “Is S2C valid, or is S2C a ‘discredited method’ that has been debunked?” Defining valid as “logically or factually sound”, Binder-Le Pape claims that her above arguments have that characteristic, and refers readers who think those arguments fall short to an earlier blog post of hers which I addressed here.

She then adds as another metric of validity “having legal force or being legally acceptable,” and goes on to cite the ADA on giving “primary consideration to the requests of individuals with disabilities” and on requiring equal educational opportunity. As all the available evidence suggests, however, S2C and its variants interfere with the ability of individuals with disabilities to make requests and diminish their educational opportunities.

Binder-Le Pape also cites the guidelines of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) on evidence-based practices, noting that they include “clinical expertise/expert opinion,” “evidence”, and “client/parent/caregiver perspectives.” Re the last two, she alludes to her earlier arguments, “valid” as they are in her view. Re clinical expertise/expert opinion, she cites the many speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and people with special ed degrees who have come to believe in S2C. She leaves out ASHA’s position statements against S2C and its variants.

Binder-Le Pape concludes by reminding us of the “many, many universities, colleges, government committees, nonprofits, researchers, professors, teachers, doctors, psychologists, occupational therapists, lawyers, and journalists" who support S2C.

The constant appeals to authority throughout this post are a huge red flag. If the strongest case you can make for a particular practice is that most authorities accept that practice, you are on thin ice—particularly if you bear in mind the long history of bigotry in the past century and earlier, including bigotry against people with disabilities, by large numbers of authorities in politics, academia, and journalism.

But Binder-Le Pape is confident that this time the authorities—at least the ones she cites—are on the right side, in contrast to the “small group of detractors” she returns to in her closing remarks.

FC proponents never seem to ask themselves what motivation this “small group” could possibly have for undermining the authentic communications of society’s most vulnerable members.  In fact, we do the opposite. Not only do we advocate against the communication-suppressing practices of S2C and other variants of facilitated communication; many of us have devoted long hours to inventing innovative assistive devices or language teaching tools designed to enhance the independent, authentic communication of minimally speaking individuals.

Naturally, some of our detractors have asserted, without evidence, that we make large amounts of money off of these endeavors: that that’s why we oppose S2C, and that we’re the ones cynically exploiting desperate parents and their vulnerable children.  My guess is that the peddlers of S2C et al, with those “thousands of hours of practice” leading to apparently miraculous language and literacy skills, and the hours of ongoing communication and regulations partnering that many parents outsource to clinics and clinicians, make far more money off of desperate parents than any of us do with our decidedly non-miraculous, low-labor-intensive, assistive and teaching technologies.

These days especially, “skeptic” has a bad ring—and not just when used as a pejorative suffix to words like “climate” and “vaccine.” But the true skeptics I’ve met, including members of this “small group,” are some of the kindest, humblest, most self-effacing people I know. When we critique the opposition, we critique their claims and lack of evidence; we don’t make personal attacks or say nasty things about them behind their backs. Perhaps that’s no accident: when one puts evidence first and insists on being guided by that evidence, that tends to minimize one’s cognitive dissonance—along with the nastiness that cognitive dissonance often gives rise to—and to deliver regular doses of humility.

REFERENCES

Beals, K.P. (2024) Can message-passing anecdotes tell us anything about the validity of RPM and S2C?, Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2023.2290298

Sundberg, M. L., & Partington, J. W. (2013). Teaching language to children with autism and other developmental disabilities. Behavior Analysts.

Several reasons to doubt that rates of autism are going up

Do increases in diagnosed autism reflect significant increases in actual rates of autism, which here in the U.S. now stands at 1 out of 36?

Source: Wikipedia

There are several reasons to think that the answer is probably "no."

First, even the most recent peer-reviewed journal articles propose that expansions of the diagnostic criteria and of reporting practices are primarily responsible for apparent increases in autism rates.

A 2021 British study, for example, concludes:

Increases could be due to growth in prevalence or, more likely, increased reporting and application of diagnosis. Rising diagnosis among adults, females and higher functioning individuals suggest augmented recognition underpins these changes.

And a 2020 U.S. study of autism in the public schools reports:

Although the impact of environmental or genetic influences cannot be entirely ruled out, we identified significant shifts in eligibility trends that substantially contribute to the remarkable increase in autism prevalence.

And then there's this data from 2000-2010, which suggests that increasing numbers of cases once classified as intellectual disability are now classified as either autism or as autism plus intellectual disability:

Reclassification of those with intellectually disabilities, and greater identification of autism in higher functioning individuals, predicts increases in rates of severe autism and mild autism, but not increases in rates of moderate autism. 

That's because in moderate autism is hard to confuse with intellectual disability, and even harder to confuse with neurotypicality. In moderate autism there's often no intellectual disability as measured by non-verbal IQ tests, and even where there is a measured intellectual disability, it's overshadowed by the autism symptoms. Moderate autism, moreover, by definition involves more profound social and restrictive/repetitive behaviors than mild autism, and so is far less likely than mild autism to be completely overlooked.

So if those who are convinced that autism is becoming more prevalent want to convince the rest of us, they might start by demonstrating that rates of mid-spectrum autism--which is arguably the most prototypical subset of the spectrum--are rising in tandem with the rates of autism at the severe and mild tail ends of the spectrum.

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part I

 (Cross-posted at FacilitatedCommunication.org).

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.

Michel Bakni, Wikimedia Commons

Binder-Le Pape’s second myth is that “individuals who spell and type to communicate have nothing original to say, and they parrot the beliefs of their communication partners.” This misstates what critics have actually said, which is that all the available evidence suggests that the communication partners are controlling the messages. This likely message control, in turn, makes it impossible to know what the individuals subjected to S2C have to say, as their words are likely being hijacked by others.

Binder-Le Pape doesn’t seem to realize that there’s a distinction between an FCed person parroting a facilitator’s beliefs and a facilitator controlling the facilitated messages. In the case of parroting, the output reflects the facilitator’s beliefs; in the case of control, the output reflects what the facilitator ascribes (however subconsciously) to the facilitated person. Binder-Le Pape brings up cases of FC-generated opinions that differ from the opinions of facilitators, and FC-generated reports of synesthesia that facilitators themselves don’t experience, and assumes that these differences are evidence that the FC-generated messages can’t be authored by the facilitators. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that one can author a message that reflects beliefs that one ascribes to someone else—which is what all the available evidence suggests is precisely what facilitators are (however subconsciously) doing.

Instead, what we get is more circular reasoning: FC-generated messages are evidence that these FCed individuals have something original to say and that they have difficulty controlling their bodies—and that, therefore, FC is valid. FC is valid because FC is valid.

Myth 3, per Binder-Le Pape, is that “S2C hasn’t proved useful in academic settings.” Her evidence for this is more circular reasoning: through S2C-generated output, S2C-ed individuals are completing high school, attending college, graduating college, and putting “the skills they honed in college to good work.” But S2C has allowed them to do this only if the S2C-generated output is theirs, and not that of their facilitators. Again, S2C is valid because S2C is valid.

Besides the circular reasoning, there’s the argument from authority. Binder-Le Pape cites Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, Tulane, Oberlin, and Rollins as institutions that have enrolled and graduated individuals she characterizes as “non-speaking autistics who type and spell to communicate”. She also cites Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and Psychology Today as having published the typed output of one of these individuals. S2C is valid, in other words, because all these prestigious institutions behave as if it’s valid.

Myth 4: per Binder-Le Pape, is that “using a CRP [‘communication and regulations partner,’ or facilitator] prevents individuals from developing independent typing skills.” She concedes, without explaining why, that “achieving independence requires thousands of hours of practice.” Nor does she supply any evidence that any S2C-ed individual ever attains independence. True communicative independence, as we have repeatedly explained, includes the ability to type spontaneous messages that match earlier, FCed levels of sophistication without any of one’s facilitators/CRPs within auditory or visual cueing range.  

Instead, Binder-Le Pape proceeds to cite the S2C-generated words of those subjected to S2C, some of whom “say they prefer communicating on a laminated board, as it is faster and more comfortable for them.”  The circularity continues: once again, S2C-generated messages are cited as evidence that S2C-generated messages are valid.

Myth 5 is that “a message-passing test under controlled conditions is the only way to establish an individual’s independent communication.” No, she insists, a message-passing test is only one way; “direct observation” and eye-tracking are alternatives. We’ve already noted problems with Jaswal’s eye-tracking study and seen how other eye-tracking data (the data about diminished attention to social stimuli) has been unfavorable to FC. As for direct observation, it is susceptible to a well-known psychological fallacy known as naïve realism. As anyone who has attended magic shows knows, at least in the context of magic shows, you can’t always believe what you see.

Finally, Binder-Le Pape discusses natural message-passing tests—and this takes me back, as promised, to my just-published article, entitled Can message-passing anecdotes tell us anything about the validity of RPM and S2C? Here I show why naturalistic message-passing tests, including those cited by Binder-Le Pape and others, cannot be used as evidence in support of FC.

We’re half-way through the myths, and this post has gone on long enough, so we’ll pick up next time at Myth 6.

REFERENCES

Beals, K. (2021). A recent eye-tracking study fails to reveal agency in assisted autistic communication. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 15(1), 46–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17489539.2021.1918890

Beals, K.P. (2024) Can message-passing anecdotes tell us anything about the validity of RPM and S2C?, Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2023.2290298

Jaswal, V. K., Wayne, A., & Golino, H. (2020). Eyetracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 7882. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64553-9

Petit, S., Badcock, N. A., Grootswagers, T., & Woolgar, A. (2020). Unconstrained multivariate EEG decoding can help detect lexical-semantic processing in individual children. Scientific reports, 10(1), 10849. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67407-6

News rundown: more non-academic requirement in schools

(As if grit, growth mindset, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and all that social stuff weren’t already enough.)

Last year, New Jersey became the first state to require media literacy at every grade level. According to the New Jersey state website, students must now learn "the difference between primary and secondary sources" and "the difference between facts, points of view, and opinions."

Will they also learn the difference between made-up facts and well-substantiated opinions? Or that many primary studies involve flawed research, misleading literature reviews, and footnotes that don’t support the claims?

Last month, New Jersey also became the first state to require “grief education,” which will be integrated into health classes.

According to the New Jersey state website:

New Jersey’s public schools will be required to provide instruction for students in grades 8 through 12, on, at a minimum, the physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms of grief; coping mechanisms and techniques for handling grief and loss; and resources available to students, including in-school support, mental health crisis support, and individual and group therapy.

Back when I took health, in a less divisive, less emotionally fraught, more self-empowering era, the focus was on how to manage your period, how not to get pregnant, and how to administer CPR.  

Finally, last month, Pennsylvania recently became the 25^th state to require financial literacy. Starting in 2026, Pennsylvania high school students will be required to take a semester of financial literacy before graduating. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The new law didn’t mandate what topics schools must include in teaching financial literacy. Instead, it directs the Pennsylvania Department of Education to develop model curriculum and resources, aligned with state academic standards reviewed by the state Board of Education.

This trend, the Inquirer reports, “has been advocated by groups like Next Gen Personal Finance, a nonprofit pushing for all high school students to take a semester of personal finance before graduating” and has hired lobbyists to help states craft legislation.

There doesn’t seem to be an option to place out or opt out if you’d rather take a programming course or another semester of Spanish