Authorship in Facilitated Communication: An Analysis of 11 Cases

Abstract

We studied the authorship of messages produced through facilitated communication (FC) for all users of FC in two comprehensive schools in a small city in Finland. The participants were 11 children with intellectual disabilities, including autism, all having used FC from 1–3 years. The test conditions involved open and blind information-passing tasks in which the participants were directed to write down the contents of written or pictorial stimuli. The results failed to validate FC as a method of communication for any participant or facilitator. An analysis of the messages produced under the FC condition revealed a large degree of facilitator influence on the content of the messages produced. Additionally, FC impaired the performance of the two participants who had previously demonstrated some independent writing skills.

Keywords::

• Autism
• Facilitated communication
• Intellectual disabilities
• Augmentative and alternative communication

Acknowledgements

None.

Notes

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notice of correction

Since being published online on 20th June 2014, the affiliation information in this article has been updated.

Notes

1. Light Writer SL40 is available at Comp Aid Oy, Address: Koivuhaantie 2-4, 01510 Vantaa, Finland. Tel. + 358 97288 330; [email protected]

2. All text produced by the persons with autism who participated in this study was spelled letter by letter on a paper keyboard, as described in the Method section. In keeping with the style requirements of the AAC journal, we present this text first according to the conventions for the journal: the text is written in lower case, underlined, and there is a hyphen between each letter. Thereafter, because the text provided by the participants was always provided in the same way (letter by letter spelling), we use quotation marks to indicate the writing of the participants in order to promote ease of reading and analysis.