ABSTRACT
The messages that clients generated via facilitated communication were at a significantly higher level of pragmatic and semantic sophistication than their observed and reported abilities in speech, language, and communication. Utterance length and sentence structure were also more sophisticated than one would expect given the clients’ diagnoses and their institutional backgrounds. Empirical support for conventional wisdom may be found in the autism and communication literature. Skills seem all the more implausible when one considers that adult clients were institutionalized at a time when little was known about the importance of early intervention, language and environmental stimulation, and the significance of play in the development of symbolic behavior. Although the level of semantic and pragmatic sophistication evident in clients’ transcripts was distinctly out of sync with their reported and observed functioning levels, it did reflect concordance with facilitators’ judgments regarding their clients’ abilities.
