Illusions of literacy in nonspeaking autistic people: a response to Jaswal, Lampi & Stockwell, 2024

An article by Jaswal et al. (2024) purports to find evidence of literacy skills in a subset of minimal-to-nonspeaking autistic individuals with at least one year of experience communicating on a letterboard held by an assistant, a variant of facilitated communication known as Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) or Spelling to Communicate (S2C). Because the assistant can control letter selection (through letterboard movements, verbal prompts, and decisions about which letters were selected), the literacy skills of those subjected to RPM/S2C are in doubt. Additional doubt about this literacy stems from research that finds significant impairments in the receptive language skills of minimal-to-non-speaking autistic individuals. Receptive language is a prerequisite for literacy: reading and writing involve not just letter recognition and letter sequencing, but also comprehension of the words and sentences that are spelled out. Rather than assessing literacy directly by measuring recognition and comprehension of written words, however, Jaswal et al. indirectly assess one aspect of literacy – knowledge of orthographic conventions (spelling conventions and boundaries between written words) – through participants' response times to pulsing letter and symbol sequences on an iPad game designed for this purpose. This article reviews Jaswal et al.'s study, critiquing the experimental design and authors' conclusions.