Autism pseudoscience update

It's been a busy month for me in the world of autism pseudoscience. I've got one recent publication relating to one variety of autism pseudoscience and one upcoming publication on another.

(As has been observed many times over, autism is a huge magnet for pseudoscience).

My published article relates to a study that purports to find hidden literacy skills in individuals who use a variety of FC known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C). (I blogged about this study earlier, but the article is a more formal critique). Spelling to Communicate derives from an earlier form of FC known as Rapid Prompting Method (RPM); thanks to a best-selling S2C miracle memoir by anti-vaxxer and RFK Jr. associate J.B. Handley's , S2C has overtaken RPM. But now, thanks to a documentary inspired by J.B. Handley's memoir, Spellers, and its starring practitioner, Dawnmarie Gaivin (who has subsequently been featured both in Forbes and in the San Diego Tribune), S2C is looking like it will soon be overtaken by a new (but seemingly identical) brand known as the Spellers Method. There is no honor among thieves.

Meanwhile, there's a separate autism pseudoscience, the subject of my forthcoming article, that takes its inspiration from an educational pseudoscience--learning styles theory. Proponents of this take on autism, known sometimes as Natural Language Processing and sometimes as Gestalt Language Processing, propose that first language learners have one of two different learning styles: analytical  (which supposedly characterizes most non-autistic language learners) and gestalt (which supposedly characterizes most autistic language learners). These proponents are having a field day selling to both speech-language pathologists and parents the seemingly exciting and hope-filled notion that autistic children are "gestalt language processors." This, despite the absence of any evidence for such a hypothesis, and despite all the research finding that autistic individuals are better at details than at big pictures. 

Stay tuned for more on this in a later post.