Communication Matters

Navbar
Content
Home » About AAC » What is AAC? » Vocabulary

Planning and Organising Vocabulary

Planning
 
and
organising
 
vocabulary

An AAC speaker who can spell will be able to enter their own messages.

Other AAC users will need vocabulary to be stored into their device. This vocabulary could be words, phrases or complete messages, selecting vocabulary for AAC systems often demands much time and thought.

There are published vocabulary lists which can help the process. The University of Nebraska have several lists for different age groups as well as lists compiled from AAC speakers. Gail van Tatenhove also has some word lists on her website: www.vantatenhove.com

Organising Vocabularies

It would be difficult to find words within an AAC system if each chart or page were a random collection of items in no particular order.

The sections on Communication Books and Charts talk about organising pages by topic. This can be helpful, but as vocabulary is added, there may be several pages worth of words related to each topic.

How will the user know which word is on which page? Someone who can spell could have items organised alphabetically. Another option is to organise items into subcategories. For example, animals can be organised into pets, farm animals, zoo animals, wild animals etc. This works well for nouns, but other word types, for example verbs, are more difficult to categorise.

Paper-based and VOCA

There is a difference between vocabulary for a paper-based communication system and for a VOCA. For example, a paper-based vocabulary may contain more single words. There are commercially available vocabularies for paper-based systems such as the PODD (Pragmatic Organisation Dynamic Vocabularies) or Look2Talk (Ace Centre) that may be helpful and appropriate for some AAC speakers. At the very least they provide a starting point for people less familiar with creating communication books. VOCA may contain more whole or partial phrases, particularly in the initial stages of use. Some AAC speakers will move on to word based systems. However, at this level it is important to be able to sequences words in more or less the word order of the spoken language.

Commercially Available Vocabularies

There are a growing number of commercially available vocabulary sets that can be loaded into VOCAs. These published vocabularies have been created by experienced people who have given a great deal of thought to content and structure.

Unless the user has very specific needs, is generally better to spend time training the AAC speaker to use an existing vocabulary rather than devising and programming a new vocabulary set.

Examples of published vocabularies are; Ingfield Dynamic Vocabularies, Picture Word Power, CALLTalk, Language for Living and Learning.

Many VOCAs have a range of starter vocabularies ready installed. Typically there will be sets designed for different age groups, including young children, teenagers and adults.



See also: