What is Minimally-Speaking

This chapter discusses a discredited but frequently used language intervention in minimally speaking autism: facilitated communication (FC). Its variants include the rapid prompting method (RPM) and spelling to communicate (S2C). The chapter discusses the multiple organizations that advise against the use of FC and the dozens of studies that show how facilitated messages are directed by the facilitator rather than by the person that the facilitator is supposed to be merely facilitating. It also notes the growing resistance to well-controlled authorship testing and how this has translated into a dearth of rigorous research examining the validity of the latest variants. It explains how FC relies on scientifically unfounded theories of autism, language learning, and the acquisition of academic skills, and how using FC in place of evidence-based learning interventions translates into significant opportunity costs for those individuals with autism who are subjected to it.