 This is a letterboard. For many autistic people who can't speak, the letterboard is their most effective means of communication, but it's also a controversial one. The problem is that the letterboard is usually held by another person. That introduces the possibility that the assistant could unwittingly influence the individual's message by queuing them to point to certain letters. Now, a new study using eye-tracking technology suggests that the letterboard allows Virginia in communication and can be a powerful tool for some autistic individuals who struggle with speech. Researchers from the University of Virginia's Department of Psychology outfitted nine autistic individuals with eye-tracking glasses and investigated how quickly and accurately they looked at and pointed to letters when answering novel questions. Each participant had at least two years of experience using a letterboard to communicate. If individuals were receiving subtle cues from their letterboard assistant, that influence would be evident during testing. For example, one participant was asked to name something he had to wait for. He responded by spelling, waiting for my dream girl. Subtle cues are hard to detect and easily confused. So if the assistant had queued participants, the researchers would have expected participants to spell slowly, to misspell words frequently, and to look at several letters before finding the one signaled by the assistant. The researchers observed the opposite. Participants spelled quickly and accurately, pointing to about one letter every second, making only a few spelling errors, and looking at the next letter in the word about half a second after pointing to the previous letter. The researchers also identified two patterns similar to ones observed in non-autistic individuals. Participants looked at and pointed to letters within words faster than between words, and they responded to the second letter in common letter pairs faster than the second letter in less common letter pairs, e after h for instance, versus e after j. The letterboard it should be noted won't be the most effective option for all autistic individuals who struggle with speech, and further work remains to be done to explore the various settings in which the letterboard is used. Still, the study's findings offer an important response to critics of this widely used communication tool. Under certain circumstances and for certain individuals, the letterboard can enable genuine and intentional communication.