SUCCESSFUL USE OF FACILITATED COMMUNICATION WITH AN ORAL CHILD

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