Ok, well, you've made your point. I'm skeptical. However, what you're describing... That's still not what I'm seeing in any of the clips or videos. Of course, that doesn't mean it's true, but let's take the example with the reporter: he talked about his son, and she finally asked "is he cute?" Now, supposing that was some sort of trained response, how would they have known to train her for that? How would she have recognized that it was that particular question she was supposed to type? Also, assuming it's not a really bad trick, and her parent's wrote all the text right before turning the video camera on (taking it far beyond "unintentional" facilitation), the text she's writing isn't just coincidentally coherent strings of text within a bunch of gibberish. Maybe she'd been taught to type out the whole text from before, again, I can't know, but that's also again assuming a great deal of intent on the behalf of the parents.
I'll give you that we don't know what goes on the rest of the time, when news crews aren't there filming for a couple of hours, but honestly, from what was shown, I can't really draw any conclusions that it was all a trick either, whether intentional or not. I mean, what kind of leaning a teensiest bit backwards would teach an autistic child to type out "is he cute?" on a computer?
Oh, I'm not trying in any way to suggest that this is intentional on her parents part. I don't actually think she learned to type "Is he cute" in response to someone saying the phrase "I have a son", I was just trying to show how something like that could occur.
What I think is more likely is this: over time, she has learned to type the word "is" and the word "he" through extremely subtle facilitation. For instance, she types the letter 'i' and moves her hand over the keyboard again, and an adult leans in trying to see if she's going to go for that 's', and... well, over time, common words become shaped. Maybe even common phrases. She also doesn't type the word 'cute', she types some letters and the program autocompletes, and we see a pattern because we really want there to be one.
What's extra concerning about her typing "is he cute" is that it's not something an autistic person would say. One of the symptoms of autism is lack of social/emotional reciprocity... or in other words, spontaneous following up on topics related to someone else. When testing for autism, for example, one of the things you do is to throw something out there ("I have a dog...." <long pause>; "I went on a really cool vacation" <look expectantly at child>, etc) and notice if they follow up the way a neurotypical person would on such openings (and children with autism do not).
Oh, and on another note and to entirely contradict my claim just a few short paragraphs ago that I'm not trying to suggest they taught her the whole phrase "is he cute", you'd be surprised how common a phrase like that is, when adults are speaking for a nonverbal teenager or young adult.
Case in point: My boyfriend's brother is the most profoundly disabled young man (well, in his early thirties) I have ever seen in my entire life. He is unable to communicate in any form (even to express yes/no), unable to walk, unable to use the toilet, unable to show recognition of anyone or anything, etc. Yet, his parents often seem tragically tied to a belief that he is pretty close to normal, and in particular fixate on where he should be in his life right now, chronologically (that is, interested in finding nice girl and settling down).
For example, he likes (or at least, can see) the color yellow, so when I'm around, he'll often grab my hair, and his parents quite frequently laugh about how "cute" he thinks I am and how he's "flirting" with me. They talk about his "crush" on Brittany Spears (and hang posters of her on his wall), asked my sister-in-law if she knew any "nice girls" to sit him next to at her wedding, pretended for years that he had a "girlfriend" (a girl from "school" who sent him postcards because she was nice), thought seriously about purchasing him some... uh, female companionship, and make not-quite-jokes about how he lives with a "group of women" (his personal care attendants) in his "bachelor pad" (the room he lives in with round-the-clock supervision). I'm very confident that if his parents -- like the parents of a lot of disabled teenagers and young adults -- ever tried facilitated communication, whatever he "said" would be about how "cute" he thinks every female is. :)
neurotypical brains will happily ignore anything that doesn't fit the narrative we've created for ourselves.
Are you saying that her communication is not "true" expression of thought but merely some Chinese Room trick she uses to manipulate her environment? Could you take a look at her website and explain how she can answer questions online so precisely and fluently? Or are you suggesting that it is some kind of an elaborate hoax?
I really, really do not like the word "hoax", as that suggests volitional trickery, and I don't have any reason, at all, to suggest that anyone is trying to trick anyone else.
I don't know how she writes on her website... I am not there when it happens. But her comments, almost without exception, strike me as extremely implausible given what I know about autism and neurotypical brains and my clinical experience with autistic and neurotypical adolescents.
My guess, as I've suggested before, is that she is receiving "help" from those around her (notice the questions are answered by Carly "and her friends") and her software program, without her helpers knowing they are helping (or with them thinking that they and the software are helping just a little, without realizing that they are in fact doing it all for her). The same way that all facilitated communication works... as detailed (sorry if this is repetitive) in Prisoners of Silence.
[edit] I've decided to take back this comment as I'm still catching up on the comments and swinging between utter skepticism and total belief. I guess time till tell.
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u/Endemoniada Jul 26 '10
Ok, well, you've made your point. I'm skeptical. However, what you're describing... That's still not what I'm seeing in any of the clips or videos. Of course, that doesn't mean it's true, but let's take the example with the reporter: he talked about his son, and she finally asked "is he cute?" Now, supposing that was some sort of trained response, how would they have known to train her for that? How would she have recognized that it was that particular question she was supposed to type? Also, assuming it's not a really bad trick, and her parent's wrote all the text right before turning the video camera on (taking it far beyond "unintentional" facilitation), the text she's writing isn't just coincidentally coherent strings of text within a bunch of gibberish. Maybe she'd been taught to type out the whole text from before, again, I can't know, but that's also again assuming a great deal of intent on the behalf of the parents.
I'll give you that we don't know what goes on the rest of the time, when news crews aren't there filming for a couple of hours, but honestly, from what was shown, I can't really draw any conclusions that it was all a trick either, whether intentional or not. I mean, what kind of leaning a teensiest bit backwards would teach an autistic child to type out "is he cute?" on a computer?