The following is an abstract from an article published in the
Twenty-one subjects participated in a study of Biklen's and Crossley'shypothesis that persons with autism show unexpected literacy and improvedcommunication ability through the process offacilitated communication(FC). Repeated measures of literacy were conducted at (a) a baseline test ofcommunicative ability before FC; (b) a pretest with facilitation; and (c) aposttest with facilitation after 20 hours of training. At both the pretest andposttest, the facilitators were screened from hearing and seeing the questionsor pictorial stimuli. Although some facilitators reported newfoundcommunicative abilities during training sessions, no client showed unexpectedliteracy or communicative abilities when tested via the facilitator screeningprocedure, even after 20 hours of training. Separate analyses indicated thatsome facilitators influenced the communicative output of their clients.
The following is an abstract from an article published in the journal
This report presents a quantitative study of facilitated communication. Participants were 12 people living at an institutional autism program and 9people who provided them with facilitated communication support. These subjectswere the 12 most competent producers of facilitated communication in theprogram. They were shown pictures of familiar objects and asked to type thenames of the objects under three conditions: (a) assisted typing withfacilitators unaware of the content of the stimulus picture, (b) unassistedtyping, and (c) a condition in which the participants and facilitators wereeach shown pictures at the same time. In this last condition, paired pictureswere either the same or different, and the participant's typing was facilitatedto label or describe the picture. These participants were unable to succeed inthe tasks without facilitator assistance. On trials when the facilitators andparticipants had different pictures, the only "correct" labels werefor pictures shown to the facilitators and not shown to the participants. Thisfinding demonstrates that the facilitators were unknowingly determining what wastyped.