Successful use of facilitated communication with an oral child

A 6 1/2-year-old child's oral and spelled utterances were compared over a 3-month period as he was trained to use Facilitated Communication (FC), a method of augmentative and alternative communication. The child's language with FC was significantly better than his oral language in length of utterances, novelty of utterances, and syntactic complexity. His language with FC also contained more function words and over time was more intelligible and required less verbal scaffolding than his oral communication. Evidence that he was authoring his own messages during his facilitated spelling was found in his idiosyncratic use of language and his ability to convey verifiable information that was unknown to the facilitator. The strongest evidence came later with his ability to type messages without physical support. The results suggest the potential for using FC with children who have some functional oral skills but cannot express themselves fully in the oral modality. The method can serve as a means of investigating language potential and as a transition to literacy and independent typed communication.