Scripting Is Not a Symptom—It’s Speech: What This ABA Study Gets Dangerously Wrong

A GLP Perspective on Communication, Consent, and the Right to Be Heard

A legal and ethical critique of a 2025 ABA study targeting autistic toddlers, exposing its failure to protect communication rights, recognise lived experience, or prevent harm—through a lens of AGP and disability law.

Source Paper Citation

Strohmeier, C. W., Thuman, E., Falligant, J. M., Cengher, M., Chin, M. D., & Kurtz, P. F. (2025). Resurgence of Severe Challenging Behavior and Schedule Thinning with the Terminal Schedule Probe Method. Behavioral Sciences, 15(3), 382. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15030382

Introduction

There is growing recognition within both academic and disability communities that research involving autistic individuals—especially children—must meet rigorous ethical and legal standards. These include compliance with disability rights frameworks such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and IDEA, alongside evolving understandings of autistic communication, autonomy, and personhood. At the same time, autistic-led scholarship, particularly through the lens of Able Grounded Phenomenology (AGP), urges researchers to reframe how they interpret behaviour, shifting from externalised behavioural control to the internal, embodied, and relational experience of the autistic person.

It is in this context that I turn to the recent article published in Behavioral Sciences, a journal within the MDPI portfolio. The paper proposes the use of the Terminal Probe (TP) method to reduce so-called “severe challenging behaviours” in children, including those as young as three. Actions listed as “problematic” include tapping surfaces, licking objects, or moving away from adults—behaviours which, in many cases, reflect either communicative intent or age-typical regulation strategies. The study outlines a regime of behavioural suppression under the guise of “intervention,” with no exploration of the communicative function of these actions, no apparent consent or assent measures appropriate to the age and communication style of the children, and no inclusion of long-term impact measures relating to wellbeing, autonomy, or social participation.

It is worth noting that MDPI, despite its presence in major indexing services such as Web of Science and Scopus, has faced ongoing criticism for its editorial standards and peer review practices. Though removed from Beall’s list of potentially predatory publishers after appeal, MDPI remains under scrutiny from academic institutions—including recent downgrades from the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) and early warning listings by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The journal in which this article appears, whilst boasting a modest impact factor and indexing credentials, operates under a rapid publication model reliant on guest-edited Special Issues. This structure has drawn criticism for encouraging high volume over quality, a concern that feels especially pressing when vulnerable populations—such as disabled toddlers—are at the centre of the research.

This critique does not seek to indict the entire field of behavioural intervention. I think you know by now where I am on that. Rather, it offers a pointed examination of how this particular study fails to align with established legal mandates and ethical frameworks. Drawing on federal disability law and the AGP, I will explore how the paper misrepresents behaviour as devoid of context or meaning, disregards the communication rights of its subjects, and ultimately reinforces a system of compliance over care.

Legal Obligations in Disability Research and Services

Legal obligations in disability research and service provision are not aspirational—they are binding. In the United States, the ADA’s Title II and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act explicitly require that public entities and federally funded programmes provide effective communication access for disabled individuals. This includes recognising and accommodating non-traditional or non-verbal modes of communication. The study under review, however, treats actions such as scripting, licking, or moving away from an adult as problematic behaviours in need of elimination—without any inquiry into their communicative function or developmental appropriateness.

To suppress these expressions without first considering whether they are communicative in nature not only misrepresents the purpose of the behaviour but also risks violating these individuals’ legal rights. As the AGP reminds us, communication is not always verbal, nor is it always directed at others—it can be sensory, embodied, and self-regulatory. A child tapping their fingers rhythmically on a desk or walking away from a stimulus may be signalling discomfort, overstimulation, or simply exercising agency in a context that overwhelms. Treating such actions as disruptive rather than meaningful reveals an underlying deficit lens, rather than one grounded in either rights-based reasoning or developmental understanding.

Further, the study describes the use of padded rooms and enforced physical separation from adults—presumably as part of a behaviour management plan—yet offers no legal or ethical justification for the use of such restrictive practices. Under both IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and the ADA, disabled children are entitled to supports that enable them to access services in the least restrictive environment (LRE). Interventions must be tailored to the individual and focus on enabling participation, not enforcing compliance. The decision to isolate a three-year-old for licking or scripting not only fails to meet these legal expectations, it starkly contradicts the principle of dignity that underpins both IDEA and the ADA. Moreover, isolation-based practices have well-documented associations with trauma, especially in disabled children who cannot advocate for themselves—yet the study makes no mention of harm reduction, trauma monitoring, or emotional impact.

There is also a fundamental mischaracterisation of the type of support autistic children require. Medicaid distinguishes between rehabilitative services (aimed at restoring lost function following injury) and habilitative services, which are designed to assist individuals in acquiring and maintaining skills necessary for daily living when those skills have not developed in typical ways. Autistic children are eligible for the latter. Yet the study’s entire premise is based on extinguishing behaviours—many of which are either harmless or functional—rather than developing and accommodating alternative, self-directed means of communication. This is a reflection not of ‘evidence-based support,’ but of systemic bias: an assumption that developmental differences should be reshaped into the norms of the neuro-majority, even at the cost of autonomy or well-being.

Finally, there is a glaring absence of any outcome measures that align with federally mandated disability policy. The study focuses narrowly on the suppression of designated behaviours, without considering broader or more meaningful outcomes such as increased access to learning, improved communication, community participation, or reductions in institutionalisation—outcomes which are core benchmarks in both Medicaid-funded services and IDEA implementation. This narrow behavioural framing effectively reduces the child to a list of disruptions to be minimised, rather than a person with rights, needs, and a trajectory of development that must be supported. From an AGP standpoint, this erasure of the individual’s lived experience is ethically indefensible; from a legal standpoint, it is potentially actionable.

When research is conducted with public implications—whether in the form of training programmes, funding priorities, or treatment recommendations—it must be held to the highest standards of compliance and ethical accountability. This study, by failing to engage either, leaves its subjects not only unsupported, but fundamentally unrecognised.

Phenomenological and Epistemic Critique

One of the most striking and troubling features of the study is its complete exclusion of the lived experience of the children it targets. The entire approach is constructed around external behavioural observation and adult-imposed interpretation, without any reference to autistic voices, communication rights, or the internal meaning of the actions being pathologised. This is a textbook case of epistemic exclusion: where the meaning-making of autistic people is not only omitted but overwritten by interpretations grounded in compliance and control. The result is research done to rather than with or for the children it purports to support.

From the standpoint of Able Grounded Phenomenology (AGP), this constitutes a deep ethical breach. AGP calls on researchers to centre the lived, embodied experience of autistic people—not to speak over them, but to begin inquiry with their subjectivity and ways of knowing. This study makes no attempt to investigate how the children experience the interventions, nor how the targeted behaviours may relate to regulation, communication, or autonomy. Take, for example, the treatment of “scripting a phrase” as a behaviour to be extinguished. In all likelihood, this refers to echolalic expression—a hallmark of gestalt language processing. For many GLPs, like me for example, scripted language is not meaningless repetition; it is a form of communication, emotional processing, and relational connection. What may appear to a neurotypical observer as “repetitive” or “out of context” is often an intentional and nuanced expression drawn from a reservoir of lived linguistic experience.

To suppress scripting without understanding its function, purpose, or emotional salience is not simply misguided—it is harmful. It silences an emergent communication style that, for many autistic individuals, precedes and scaffolds the development of more complex expressive abilities. In doing so, the study reinforces a normative hierarchy of communication in which only speech that conforms to analytic, linear models is recognised as valid. From both a disability rights perspective and an AGP lens, this is indefensible.

The paper also fails to consider whether the targeted behaviours—including scripting, licking, swiping, or moving away—may arise in response to sensory overload, distress, or an unmet need for control or space. There is no effort to explore internal states, and no mechanism in place for identifying emotional or psychological harm. Instead, behaviours are treated as disruptions to be managed, with no attention paid to what those behaviours might be communicating. This is particularly concerning in the context of young children, many of whom may be nonspeaking or minimally verbal, and therefore reliant on such behaviours as their only means of expression. The methodological decision to exclude these possibilities reflects a view of behaviour as merely observable output, devoid of subjectivity—a view AGP explicitly challenges.

Equally absent are protections against psychological or relational harm. There is no monitoring of trauma responses, no discussion of distress, and no follow-up to assess how enforced compliance might impact a child’s developing sense of safety, agency, or trust. This silence is ethically loud. For children who are repeatedly told through practice—not just words—that their communication style is wrong, or that their natural expressions of distress or joy are punishable, the impact can be profound and lasting. AGP demands a proactive ethic of care, especially for individuals who cannot easily self-advocate within traditional frameworks. The failure to embed this into the research design reveals not only a gap in the study's ethical reasoning but a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to support disabled children with dignity and respect.

Ultimately, a study that treats communication as deviance, disregards lived experience, and omits safeguards against harm does not meet the basic criteria of ethical or valid research. From an AGP perspective, it does violence to the inner worlds of those it silences. From a legal perspective, it risks eroding the rights of some of the most vulnerable individuals in our care.

Synthesis: Why These Omissions Matter

These omissions are not minor—they are structural, and they matter. Ethical research involving disabled or differently abled children must go beyond avoiding overt harm. It must actively promote dignity, autonomy, and long-term benefit. The legal obligations that underpin disability services in the United States—whether through IDEA, Section 504, the ADA, or Medicaid—are designed not merely to prevent mistreatment, but to guarantee that publicly funded interventions produce socially meaningful and measurable outcomes. These include access to education, increased participation in community life, improved communication, and reduced reliance on institutional or segregated services. Nowhere in the study is there evidence that the intervention led to any of these things.

Instead, the measurable outcomes presented are entirely negative in character: a reduction in undesired behaviours, interpreted solely through the lens of adult convenience and institutional control. There is no evidence that these children were better able to engage with peers, access learning, or express their needs more effectively. There is no mention of their emotional wellbeing, nor any attempt to track whether they felt safer, more understood, or more connected as a result of the intervention. And so we are left to ask: what benefit can possibly be claimed for a study that views suppressed behaviour as success, when that behaviour may have been the child’s only available form of communication?

In such a context, the cost is not just academic—it is traumatic. When communication is suppressed in young children, particularly those who are nonspeaking or developmentally marginalised, the long-term consequences are not simply missed opportunities—they are active harms. We cannot measure social or educational gains in a child who has learned to be silent out of fear, or who has internalised that their instinctive way of processing the world is wrong. Trauma inflicted in the name of “support” is not ethically or legally defensible—and yet the study in question offers no metrics capable of distinguishing trauma from success.

This disconnect is made all the more troubling by the growing awareness within related fields—particularly speech-language pathology—of the legitimacy and importance of gestalt language processing. Within the SLP space, models like Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) are gaining traction for their affirmation of echolalia, scripting, and idiosyncratic language as valid and meaningful. These models are relational, person-centred, and grounded in a deep respect for neurodivergent language development. They do not seek to “correct” language but to understand it on its own terms, scaffolding communication in ways that honour the speaker’s intent. This stands in sharp contrast to the behavioural research tradition that continues to treat these same expressive acts as deviance to be extinguished.

That a three-year-old’s scripting—potentially their only means of narrating their world—is treated in this study as a problem behaviour requiring strategic suppression, whilst SLPs are increasingly recognising such scripting as foundational communication, is a damning indictment of the disciplinary silos that persist. It exposes the failure of behavioural research to evolve in step with neurodiversity-affirming practice, and it shows the human cost of that failure.

Ultimately, research that erases first-person experience, ignores legal obligations, and defines success as silence cannot claim legitimacy—only compliance. And for a vulnerable population whose very existence is too often framed as a disruption, compliance should never be the goal. Communication, agency, and authentic connection must be the benchmarks we pursue. Anything less is not support—it is suppression.

Final Thoughts …

This critique is not a wholesale rejection of behavioural research. Behaviourist frameworks, like any tools, are shaped by the values and systems in which they are embedded. For some families, particularly those navigating school systems or public service landscapes that remain profoundly under-resourced, behaviour-based interventions can appear to offer structure, predictability, or access to supports that might otherwise be denied. In communities historically marginalised by race, disability, language, and class, behaviourism is sometimes packaged as the only available pathway to perceived inclusion or safety—even when that inclusion or safety comes at the cost of authenticity or agency. It is essential to recognise the structural inequalities that constrain choice and influence how different communities encounter and make use of these models.

But none of this complexity excuses the failings in the paper under review. Whatever one’s position on the broader field, there is no defensible justification for research that silences communication, erases internal experience, and reframes developmentally appropriate behaviours as disruptions warranting control. The study does not merely fall short—it bypasses the most basic requirements of ethical research. It offers no informed consent process appropriate to the developmental and communication profiles of its participants, no exploration of harm, no integration of first-person or community perspectives, and no outcome measures grounded in the rights and wellbeing of the children involved. In doing so, it reflects the worst tendencies of behaviourist practice: a fixation on surface control over mutual understanding, on compliance over connection.

Research involving disabled children must do more than tally behaviours. It must uphold their federally protected civil rights. It must centre communication not as a skill to be shaped but as a right to be supported—whether it emerges through echolalia, movement, silence, scripting, gesture, or any other modality. It must begin with the premise that disabled children are whole people with inner lives, not blank slates onto which adult preferences can be imposed.

There are research models that already embody these principles. Frameworks grounded in disability law and informed by epistemologies like Able Grounded Phenomenology offer a path forward—one that does not sacrifice rigour for ethics, but rather insists that the two are inseparable. AGP, in particular, reminds us that lived experience is not anecdotal noise but foundational data. It calls for research that begins in relationship and proceeds with humility, inviting autistic people to be co-constructors of knowledge rather than passive objects of study.

Behavioural research will only be worth defending when it reflects these commitments. Until then, we must continue to ask not just what is being reduced, but who is being diminished in the process—and whether the cost of compliance is a silence too heavy to carry.