Reporter Volume 25, No.25 April 21, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff
Judith Duchan has been involved with speech pathology almost from the
time it was founded as a field in the 1950s, and remains on the
cutting edge of speech pathology issues to this day.
	Duchan, who became chair of the Department of Communicative
Disorders and Sciences this year, came to UB in 1978. She has received
numerous grants for her research, and is the co-author of the book,
Assessing Children's Language in Naturalistic Contexts, as well as
several other forthcoming volumes. Her work on what is called
"facilitated communication," a method which allows autistic people to
communicate with others, is at the center of a current controversy
which raises questions about the very nature of communication.
	Duchan grew up in a professional family, with a father who was
a physician, at a time, she says, when women were not encouraged to
follow the same career path as men. "In my father's family, men became
doctors, women became social workers, teachers or nurses," Duchan
says. "So becoming a speech pathologist represented a mild rebellion.
But many of my cousins, both male and female, became academicsQthere
was strong family appeal and support for this kind of work."
	Duchan wrote an English term paper in high school on the
just-emerging area of speech pathology, and then majored in the field
at Ohio State. After graduating, she earned her master's while working
as a speech pathologist in Cincinnati's public schools. Eventually she
was hired in Madison, Wisconsin as a language therapist. At that time,
language therapy was a brand new field, Duchan says. "We looked at
children's acquisition of language, and did clinical work with
children who didn't acquire language normally," she says.
	At the University of Illinois, where she received her Ph.D.,
Duchan was one of the very first generation of language specialists in
psychology. "The whole field of psycholinguistics was starting then,"
she says. "This was during the time of the Chomsky revolution and
'transformational grammar'Qwe thought the most important part of
language was syntax, so we tested students on sentence structures, to
see if they said and knew them. Some people studied typical children;
I studied children who had language disorders."
	At Buffalo State College, where she worked from 1973 to 1978,
Duchan says she became interested in autism, which she describes as "a
developmental disability that has been traditionally thought to cause
difficulty with social interaction, severe language learning problems,
and stereotyped behaviors that include a variety of physical
movements. Autistic people are also thought to be committed to keeping
things the same, to be upset by change," Duchan says.
	In studying the language of autistic people, Duchan discovered
that, in fact, the sounds they made were attempts to communicate.
"When you talk with them, they echo back different sounds and words
for different situations," Duchan says. "The words they say don't tell
you what they mean, but you can tell what the words mean by the way
they're said."
	Duchan's approach became to look at what was thought of as
symptoms and see how they worked for specific individuals. "In many
cases we miss the meaning of these things when we treat them as
symptoms rather than as interpretable behaviors," she says.
	It was this attitude that led Duchan to see the possibilities
in facilitated communication, she says. In facilitated communication,
an autistic person and a facilitator communicate with each other
through typing on a keyboard or using other communication devices.
"Because I was looking for competence, I was in a framework that
allowed me to accept the unexpected competence revealed by facilitated
communication," Duchan says.
	According to Duchan, there are four basic parts of facilitated
communication. "First, as facilitator, you interact with the
communicator as though they're competent," she says. "Secondly, you
provide emotional support. You say 'I know you're able to do this, I
know you're smart.' Thirdly, you provide them communicative
supportQyou ask them to communicate with you on a level that they can,
and narrow the choices for discussion so you can find common
groundQsuch as saying, 'Do you like sports, or going to the movies?'
	"Lastly, in facilitated communication you provide physical
support through touch," Duchan says. "You hold the communicator's hand
and provide physical resistance in a way that gives organization for
their movements. As communication progresses over time, you slowly
fade back the physical support."
	A big issue is whether the communicator can become physically
independent, Duchan says. "Some people only believe facilitated
communication has worked if you don't touch the person," she says.
	In fact, the physical contact in facilitated communication is
the source of the current controversy, Duchan says. "A facilitator can
influence someone if they're not careful," she says. "Critics are
asking who is really offering the message."
	Such critics have developed validation tests, Duchan says, in
which the facilitator and the communicator are shown different
pictures whose meaning they then try to communicate to each other.
Study results have shown that this sort of communication usually
cannot be performed, Duchan says. Even worse, in some percentage of
cases the communicator types what the facilitator sees, which is
called facilitator influence, Duchan says.
	Critics are using such results to say that facilitated
communication isn't valid, Duchan says.
	Without denying that facilitated communication is subject to
potential problems, Duchan points out that nervousness about being
tested, and fear of the possible results of failure, play an important
role in test results. "The communicators know that if they flunk,
their communication is going to be withdrawn, and so they're
vulnerable and can't do it."
	Furthermore, Duchan believes that people fail the current
validation tests mainly because the assumptions behind such tests
misunderstand the very nature of communication. "What if communication
is like a dance, something shared, rather than something done by two
isolated participants?" Duchan asks. "Instead of communication being
considered two separate people sending messages, it would then be
about people collaborating to make sense.
	"I'm hoping to help others realize that if facilitated
communication was just somebody pushing somebody's finger, then
development and changes in the communication wouldn't be so complex,"
Duchan says. "I currently have a Ph.D. student, Rae Sonnenmeier, who's
working to develop a better validation test, one that doesn't violate
the very nature of communication.
	"A big problem is that the media ends up being the place where
the debate gets carried out, and that's not a valid way to discover
what's really going on," Duchan says. "Universities are really the
place where such issues need to be resolved."