Spellers but not Readers? Do facilitated individuals ever read books?
Let’s begin with an authorship-to-readership syllogism:
For a message to be authored by someone, it must be understood by that person.
For a typed message to be understood by that person, the words must be words that person can spell.
If someone can spell words, then they should be able to read them.
Therefore if those undergoing facilitated communication are the authors of the sophisticated messages that are attributed to them, they should be able to read messages of similar sophistication.
So why, in all the images and videos of individuals who are subjected to one or another version of facilitated communication (FC, RPM, S2C), do we never see these people reading; only being read to by others?
Here, for example, is Carly Fleischmann, a non-speaking autistic person who can only type messages with a designated helper sitting within auditory and visual cueing range, being read to by her father.
This image comes from a 20/20 segment featuring Carly Fleischmann (posted in 2012 on YouTube). In this video, starting just after 2:40, we see Carly’s father reading to Carly from Love in the Time of Cholera:
[T]he room resembled a ship’s cabin, its walls…
The reading is interrupted with a voiceover attributed to Carly that is also displayed on a screen:
Dear Dad, I love when you read to me. And I love when you believe in me. I know I am not the easiest kid in the world. However you are always there for me, holding my hand and picking me up. I love you.
If Carly is the author of the above message, and if she understands her father’s spoken words when he reads out loud to her, what’s preventing her from reading Love in the Time of Cholera to herself? Or, at least, the Twilight Series or Harry Potter?
In Carly’s father’s memoir Carly’s Voice, one of the messages attributed to Carly is this: “It takes a lot out of me to read a book, but I like when someone reads to me” (p. 243). As to why reading would take so much out of her, there is no elaboration.
Another memoir, The Reason I Jump, attributed to another facilitated individual, Naoki Higashida, also acknowledges that there is a reading issue, and also doesn’t elaborate why. In answer to the question “Why do you dislike reading and picking apart longer sentences,” the response is: “The problem isn’t that I dislike longer sentences. The problem is that my patience wears out so quickly. I get tired so soon and lose track of what the sentence was about. I read simple picture books without much trouble (p. 81).
Let’s turn now to Joey, a non-speaking autistic boy being read to by an S2C clinician from a handout called “The Kuiper Belt: What is it like where Pluto lives?”, as we see in this “S2C lesson” posted to YouTube:
PLUTO was considered one of nine planets in the solar system until 2006 when it was RECLASSIFIED (assigned to a different class or category) as a DWARF planet. It confused and saddened many people why Pluto was EVICTED (moved or forced out) from planet status. But something had to be done following the discovery of several other objects of planet size in the KUIPER BELT (pronounced Ky-per). [The capitalized words are spelled out by the clinician after she reads them.]
(For Janyce’s analysis of this video, see here.)
In answer to various questions about the passage, Joey points to letters (albeit with a great deal of prompting, board movement, board switching, and initially faulty letter selections) the spell the words “planet,” “Pluto,” “dwarf”, “Kuyber belt,” and “evicted.”
Finally, here is Dawnmarie Gaivin (from a scene in Spellers) reading to two boys who purportedly spell to communicate via S2C:
The East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry was essential a feud between Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records. Oakland-based Rapper Tupac Shakur then kicked off the rivalry with Biggie by alleging that he and Puff Daddy were behind Tupac being robbed and shot five times in the lobby of a New York recording studio. Biggie’s track Who Shot Ya was released soon after Tupac’s attempted murder, although Bad Boy Records denied involvement and claimed the song was recorded months prior to the incident. Still the hip-hop community interpreted it as a taunt at Tupac.
In response to this reading, one of the boys purportedly types, in response: “Gross. I agree that’s f***ed up,” and the other (albeit with lots of prompting, physical obstruction, and board movement), “The gross part is his smirk while planning Tupac’s demise.”
Nowhere in Spellers, or in any other FC documentaries (The Reason I Jump, Deej, Autism is a World), or in any of the FC-promoting videos on YouTube, do we ever see the eyes of a facilitated person scanning letters arranged meaningfully into words and sentences in books—for all the times we see their index fingers pointing at letters arranged in alphabetic rows on boards.
The only discussion of what reading in FCed individuals looks like, so far as I know, is in Portia Iversen’s memoir Strange Son (the source of so many unwittingly revealing revelations about FC). Consider what Iversen writes of Tito Mukhopadhyay, the purported author of sophisticated email messages, poetry, and philosophical musings, as well as a published book:
When I visited their apartment, I often found Tito just sitting there on the couch with the same blank expression on his face. Didn’t he get terribly bored, just sitting there, unable to read a book on his own, unable to turn on the radio or TV, unable to do anything at all? (p. 117; emphasis added here and below).
(Since 2006, when Portia’s book was released, nine additional books have come out attributed to Tito.)
Elaborating further, Iversen reports, with reference to Soma Mukhopadhyay, Tito’s mother and RPM’s “inventor”:
Tito preferred to be read to… Yet in spite of the cognitively and academically advanced material Soma read to Tito, she would only read a few sentences at a stretch to him, followed by questions. (p. 185)
The RPM-generated answers to these questions purportedly indicated that “Tito could absorb and comprehend the material quite well.”
As for Tito’s own reading habits, Iversen reports:
He would glance at the page when prompted by his mother and afterward could answer questions about the content. That meant he could read silently to himself, but not unassisted. Not surprisingly, another obstacle was that Tito could not initiate reading on his own, just as he was unable to pick up his alphabet board or pen and paper, or go to his laptop to initiate communication. But perhaps the most insurmountable barrier to Tito’s reading independently was that he could not physically handle a book by himself in such a way that it could actually be read. Not only could he not scan the words with his eyes without the guidance and prompting of his mother but he could not even turn the pages in an ordinary way and would quickly revert to stimming on the pages, flipping them back and forth in front of avidly sniffing them. (pp. 185-186)
At around 1:50 on this PBS video, a slick promotional video for Tito and his sensory experiences, we see him doing just that.
As to the question of whether Tito himself can read out loud:
[T]he answer was yes—sort of. Soma tried to teach Tito to talk by having him read with her... Later Tito graduated to reading aloud without his mother’s voice accompanying him, but still Soma had to initiate for him, hold the book for him, turn each page, turn each page, and prompt each word that he read aloud… (p. 186)
As Tito himself purportedly reported (via RPM):
[It] was much harder for him to comprehend what was written by any method other than listening. He explained that this was because the struggle to read aloud or silently demanded so much effort that it was extremely distracting and diminished the attention he could focus on understanding the text. (p. 186).
The reason, Iversen writes in an appendix to Strange Son, is that Tito is an “auditory learner” and “when the auditory-type child fails to develop speech, he is usually surrounded by the very visual materials that he can’t process.” (p. 6). Besides the evidence against learning styles in general and “auditory learners” in particular, the question, of course, is why an auditory learner would find it easier to type than to speak.
Then there’s Portia’s own son, Dov. As Iversen reports, Dov would glance only “fleetingly” at pages when directed to read but, through RPM, could accurately answer reading comprehension questions about increasingly difficult books (p. 310).
Setting aside the questionable validity of Dov’s RPM-delivered answers, is it possible to read pages of text through fleeting glances?
Actual reading—reading for meaning—requires sequential word-by-word, line-by-line eye fixations. As Seidenberg explains in Language at the Speed of Sight (p. 70), reading speed is limited by the following factors:
About seven to eight letters are read clearly on each fixation
Fixation durations average around 200 to 250 milliseconds (four to five per second).
Words in most texts are about five letters long on average.
4 fixations per second = 240 fixations per minute
240 fixations X 7 letters per fixation = 1,680 letters per minute
1,680 letters / 6 (five letters per word plus a space) = 280 words per minute
Assuming an average of somewhere around 250 words for a full page of text (see estimates given here), experienced readers, for full comprehension, have to spend close to a minute looking at a page. (For discussion of how full comprehension allows minimal word skipping, see Seidenberg, pp. 71-73). Illustrated books for less experienced readers might require less sustained page gazing, but “fleeting glances” simply won’t cut it. Nor does just gazing: the eyes must move back and forth, left to right, line by line, fixation by fixation.
Ay, but there’s a rub. Somewhere in FC Land I hear voices reminding me that FCed kids are geniuses. How do I know that they aren’t actually “visual thinkers” with photographic memories that allow them to “take a picture” of a page of text, look away, and then read the page in their heads—perhaps in ways that are invisible to others?
There are two problems.
First, the person asking comprehension questions would have to allow enough time between the fleeting glance at the page and the response to the comprehension question for the FCed person to have been able to read the words in the picture of the page in his or her head, which would still require eye fixations at four fixations per second, etc., and therefore still require close to a minute per full page of text.
Second, there’s no evidence that photographic memory actually exists, as neurologist Barry Gordon, writing in Scientific American tells us. Joshua Foer, writing in Slate adds:
Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre—but real—perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away. Children with eidetic memory never have anything close to perfect recall, and they typically aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a body of text.
So much for the possibility of reading without looking like you’re reading.
Now it could be that there are videos out there of FCed kids picking up books and looking like they’re reading them: looking like they’re reading, that is, for meaning, with all the requisite visual attention and sequential eye fixations. If anyone knows of any, they are welcome to share them here.
REFERENCES
Foer, Joshua (2006). The Accused Harvard Plagiarist Doesn’t Have a Photographic Memory. No One Does. https://slate.com/technology/2006/04/no-one-has-a-photographic-memory.html
Fleischmann, Arthur (2012). Carly’s Voice. Touchtone.
Gordon, Barry (2013). Does Photographic Memory Exist? - Scientific American
Higashida, Naoki (2013). The Reason I Jump. Random House.
Iversen, Portia (2006). Strange Son. Riverhead.
Iversen, Portia (6007). The Informative Pointing Method. https://strangesonbook.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/informative_pointing_method.pdf
Seidenberg, Mark. (2017). Language at the Speed of Sight. Basic Books
