Why don’t articles about nonspeaking autistics include videos showing them composing the eloquent commentaries they claim to create via letter boards or typing — with the camera aimed on the letters they’re selecting?
It’s believable if the nonspeaking autistic person began pointing to letters at age seven, spelling out words at the level of a typical second-grader – and as they grew older, their ability to write via letter boards grew with them.
It’s not the least believable when an autistic adult — with no history of any literacy — is presented with a letter board for the first time – and suddenly, they’re spelling out paragraphs at adult level.
Their bylined stories claim their language has been locked inside them all their life, and all it took was a laminated letter board or cheap stencil board to unleash a firestorm of adult-level narrative.
This just isn’t believable. If an autistic adult has normal intelligence, and all along knew how to read (and thus spell) since childhood, then why didn’t they – as a young child – seek out a pencil and begin writing messages?
If a child has at least second-grade literacy skills, but can’t speak – it’d be instinctive for them to grab at pens, pencils, markers or crayons and communicate on the nearest sheet of paper, even if it’s just names of their favorite foods or cartoons.
They might even grab their mother’s lipstick and write coherent phrases (albeit misspellings) on the wall with it. For sure, they’d instintively do this by age 10.
©Lorra Garrick
How would they NOT know to pick up a pencil one day and start scrawling what they want to say? Come on now.
But let’s suppose that child, due to their young age, can’t think to do this – even though they somehow, along the way, learned how to read and spell.
This then begs the question: How come the parents didn’t think to put a crayon in their hand and instruct them, “write what you want for dinner”?
Nonverbal Autistic Communicates First Time Ever As Adult Via Letter Board
It’s so not realistic that highly educated parents would never think to put letters before their nonverbal son during his childhood when surely he was able to read, if by young adulthood, he’s supposedly composing (via letter board) narrative consistent with what professional writers or college professors do.
It’s not credible that only when some stranger — through a “rapid prompting method” program – put a letter board before them as an adult, that finally there was a breakthrough. Really?
His highly educated parents never thought to do something like this when he was eight or nine?
Surely he was literate this young if, as a young adult, he’s cranking out advanced commentaries!
Seems to me that the parents would be fashioning homemade letter boards or putting Scrabble letters before their kid by the time he was eight, nine or 10! These stories don’t add up.
On the other hand … maybe they did present him with a letter board early in his life – and nothing happened.
But if nothing happened, this isn’t consistent with all this advanced narrative gushing out with letter board rapid prompting in young adulthood.
Nobody goes from zero literacy (first grade level) to professional writer literacy — even high school level — over such a dramatically short period of time.
It’s more believable that the parents are the composers and simply sticking their son’s byline on the commentaries.
But then, why would they do this? Several plausible explanations come to mind.
Highly Educated Parents Less Accepting of Non-Communication in Child
It stands to reason that if parents are highly educated and well-read, that their child’s inability to communicate would be far more crushing than if they were poorly educated or high school dropouts.
Think about that for a moment. It just seems logical that if both parents, for instance, never completed high school, that they’d demand less from a non-communicating child; they’d be more accepting of it.
It makes sense that very articulate, well-educated parents would demand more.
Hence, the latter parents would be more devastated over the reality that their own flesh and blood will never have spoken or written language.
We see this phenomenon all the time in typical families.
If the parents have college degrees, they’re far more likely to expect and want this from their kids, than if they were both high school dropouts.
- My father has two degrees; my mother one. I have five older siblings.
- I grew up in a “you’re going to college” household.
- It would’ve been unthinkable to my parents if any of their kids opted out of college.
- Imagine how devastating if one of their kids couldn’t speak or write.
Parents of the never-speaking Autistic would forever be hoping that one day, speech will come, or that one day, the child will be fluent with communication technology (AAC or augmentative and alternative communication device).
But some nonspeaking autistics, even in adulthood, are just not capable of even effectively using these – due to profound impairment in the brain’s communication center.
Out of desperation, the parents may create a fictitious profile of their grown child or older teen – characterized by high literary skills – as a way to cope with what they know is the hard reality: They’ll never communicate.
They take it a step further by promoting this “new found voice” on social media.
They write commentaries with the child’s byline to make the fantasy even more real.
Financial Incentive
I’ve come to know a friendly man, “Pat,” through autism functions, who has never spoken.
One day he had an AAC in his hands. It had all the bells and whistles if he wanted to communicate a complete sentence.
I was asking him simple questions, for which he could’ve pointed to pictures as answers.
He was not able to work the device. The only response he was able to give was when I asked him to point to a picture that he has a tattoo of.
I also asked him to point to his favorite food, and he did so.
This is rudimentary communication. Everything beyond that was dead in the water.
Yet Pat supposedly has composed numerous poems via facilitated communication.
How is it that someone who can manufacture advanced poetry can’t learn basic AAC use?
Spelling out poems with multiple stanzas requires a neurological process that’s way more complicated than basic AAC use.
Also, if Pat can compose poetry, why wouldn’t he carry a pad and pencil and communicate through printing?
Seems this would be more efficient than carrying around an expensive AAC device (which can’t fit in a pocket).
Before you point out that maybe he lacks the motor control to print on paper:
This isn’t the issue. A six-year-old could print.
I’ve seen Pat deftly pluck chips out of a single-serving size bag on a table.
He has taken my hands into his. The motor control IS THERE. Nobody says he must print like a scrivener.
Those poems were written by someone else, and have been used to promote sales of merchandise.
Look, anything’s possible – except dribbling a football.
Why should it be difficult to believe that there exist parents who’ll feign a grown autistic child’s expressive literacy, when there are parents who will sicken their child with poison to gain attention and sympathy?
I’m a true crime fan; I’ve seen documentaries where parents murdered their children for financial gain. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
The Next Best Thing to Reality: Pretending
As mentioned, it’s a crushing blow to realize your own kid will never speak – or be capable of learning American Sign Language, for that matter.
The reason we don’t see never-speaking autistic people communicating via American Sign Language (for which their parents could learn and hence, in that ideal situation, carry on conversations or even basic communication via ASL), is that the neurological process that converts thoughts to speech via vocal cords/mouth is the same as the one that converts thoughts to speech via hands/fingers. So if they can’t speak, they can’t sign.
Remember: Anything is possible. It’s not a far reach to presume that there exist parents who’ve created a make-believe reality that their silent autistic child can “finally be heard.”
It’s almost akin to a typical little girl pretending her baby doll is real, pushing it around in a stroller, talking to it, putting it to sleep, etc.
She can’t have a real baby; the next best thing is to make believe the rubber toy before her is alive.
Can it not be possible that some parents will knowingly move their nonspeaking autistic grown child’s finger to spell out what the parent would like to hear?
Look, I know this may sound far fetched. But I have seen, in person, this very scenario – only it wasn’t Pat’s parent; it was his day provider.
The first time I saw Pat, at an autism support/social group, his provider was moving his finger about a letter board, reading aloud what Pat was allegedly spelling.
Needless to say, Pat never had his eyes on the board. In fact, as the provider read aloud the spelling, the reading went faster than the letters being pointed to.
There seemed to be far more letters in the provider’s speech than what Pat’s finger was pointing to.
Subconscious Desperation
This is the ideomotor effect. It’s when tiny, unconscious (or subconscious) muscle movements by an aide make it seem like the person they’re assisting is intentionally moving or writing something — but the aide or parent is not aware of this.
In facilitated communication and the rapid prompting method, supporters think a nonverbal person is communicating through a helper or prompts.
But studies show it’s actually the facilitator or prompter unintentionally guiding the responses.
Controlled research — like studies by Wheeler et al. (1993) and Mostert (2010) for FC, and Schlosser et al. (2014) for RPM — found that when supporters didn’t know the correct answers to questions given by researchers, the responses on the letter board stopped making sense.
Why isn’t there video proof of letter board communication?
If an adult who’s been silent all their life, who’s never exhibited literacy, is now creating advanced verbiage, you’d think their support team would produce a video for proof.
After all, the parents or supporters are already making a giant claim. If you’re going to make an incredulous claim, why not back it up with video proof?
And I don’t mean very brief shots showing the person tapping at random letters that don’t spell actual words.
I’m talking about footage long enough to show the individual pointing, tapping or poking out a series of letters – be they on a cheap letter board or computer keyboard – that actually form the same level of narrative that their bylined commentaries in major online publications do.
- Show every single letter being selected.
- Periodically zoom out (no cuts) so the viewer can see who’s spelling.
- No cuts or jumps; show everything in one take until a full sentence is completed.
I’m autistic. I want proof of these claims. No, I don’t mean semi-verbal Autists who use letter boards or type — but specifically, the never-speaking ones who’ve never demonstrated literacy — and then suddenly in young adulthood can write stunning pose via pointing to letters.
