Issues raised by facilitated communication for theorizing and research on autism

There is considerable disagreement in the literature and among clinicians about the success of facilitated communication, a new method of augmentative communication being used with people diagnosed autistic. Some claim almost everyone exposed to it achieves success, basing their claims upon their observations and experiences of naturally occurring facilitated interactions. Others claim minimal or no success, basing their claims on their observations of facilitated interactions under controlled experimental conditions. I argue here that both claims can be valid and that FC users with autism are sometimes competent and other times incompetent, depending upon the conditions under which they are evaluated. I support my argument by offering a collaborative view of communication in place of the commonly held view that communication involves passing messages over an invisible conduit. Given the assumption that facilitated communication does allow for the expression of unexpected competence for many with autism, I describe various unusual phenomena being revealed by facilitation and FC users and offer some theoretical approaches for explaining these phenomena. I then propose some research ideas for studying the phenomena associated with FC and offer them as suggestions for how we might proceed in our efforts to develop our understanding of when and how it works for people with autism.