Talk:The Reason I Jump

New York Times - Voice of the Voiceless

The New York Times Sunday Book Review:

Tisdale, Sallie (23 August 2013). "Voice of the Voiceless". New York Times. Retrieved 14 January 2014.

Conrad T. Pino (talk) 07:41, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Facilitated communication has been disproved

Saying that Higashida wrote the book is like saying that John Dee & Edward Kelley were able to summon angels and communicate with them. Facilitated communication is not considered scientific. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.250.3.250 (talk) 12:33, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

• If you watch this video he looked at the paper keyboard, picked alphabets (romaji) , and read it out loud without help from someone. Though his pronunciation wasn't perfect it's totally understandable to me, native Japanese speaker. His grammar and choice of words are perfect though often he constructed the sentence word by word. In the video he explained that the paper keyboard helped him to keep the memory intact while speaking. Also I saw him writing his book using the word processor on PC. He picked correct idioms (Chinense characters, kanjis) without hesitation. It's even faster than using the paper keyboard. I have no doubt in his ability in language. His speech function is just not working. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.94.237.233 (talk) 09:03, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

  While whether the Higashidas use FC remains controversial, with the director of the documentary denying it and Temple Grandin giving them the benefit of the doubt, these things are beyond dispute as far as I can tell:

  • Douglas Biklen and Higashida spoke at a "joint lecture/forum" (co-sponsored by Amway) promoting FC.
  • Higashida has appeared in Wretches & Jabberers, a film produced by Biklen.
  • A 2017 paper (which is itself uncritical of FC) said, "In Higashida & Higashida (2005), the procedure of the assisted communication is similar to FC and Soft Touching Assistance [a method devised in Japan], and the accompanying DVD shows Higashida writing a manuscript by typing on the keyboard himself, with his mother in contact with his leg" (p. 16; my translation).
  • The documentary shows usage of FC (or RPM) in the segment shot in the US (as briefly shown in the trailer).

  What I find most curious is how Higashida and those featured in the documentary learned to spell. Unlike spoken and signed language (or "language", as linguists define it), writing is a technology that needs to be explicitly taught, not just immersed in, in order for anybody to acquire it, and for most people it takes a whole childhood to be competent or even decent at it. Specifically, English orthography is infamously inconsistent and unpredictable with regard to pronunciation correspondence, and the Japanese writing system is notoriously complex with two syllabaries and thousands of kanji characters. If their parents managed to teach them how to write, that's something lots of parents of children with learning disabilities would be eager to know, and if they didn't, it would seem there are proficient hyperlexics among non-/minimally verbal children in an extraordinary proportion. Nardog (talk) 14:52, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  I haven't looked into this, but if there are reliable sources questioning the authenticity of Higashida's authorship, then we can reflect this by writing something like "credited to Higashida", before going into detail about the controversy. edit: I didn't see this was such an old discussion. I see the article already does this, seems sensible to me assuming the sources are good. Popcornfud (talk) 15:13, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

This article doesn't seem to reflect any controversy fairly.

I've never been sure about Facilitated Communication, but this entry is flatly dismissive of the possibility that Higashida wrote this book, in a way that is not backed up by most reliable sources, and seems to ignore the fact Higashida has been filmed writing entirely independently, including in a video linked from this page. The director of the film loosely based on the book describes conversing with him in a blog post. If his first book had not in fact been written by him, it seems as if he has since had the opportunity to correct the record. I note also that he has since written (or 'been attributed'?) many more books, most of which have not been translated into English.

The assertion that "Researchers dismiss the authenticity of Higashida's writings" is not even unambiguously true of the authors of the one paper cited in support of this claim; it's certainly not true in a general sense.

I'd love to see someone rewrite this entry extensively, to “fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources.” Ideally this should be someone familiar with Higashida's work and the controversy around it... Oolong (talk) 21:02, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

A few further notes: It's inaccurate to describe Higashida as nonverbal: he speaks a little; and contrary to what this article currently claims, the book does not assert that it was written using either facilitated communication nor rapid prompting. It describes the use of an 'alphabet grid':

"The alphabet grid makes it possible to form my words by simply pointing to their letters, instead of having to write them out one by one. This also lets me anchor my words, words that would otherwise flutter off as soon as I tried to speak them.

Often, while I was learning this method, I’d feel utterly beaten. But finally I arrived at the point where I could indicate the letters by myself. " Oolong (talk) 11:13, 10 October 2024 (UTC)