Post #3: Current Approaches: Core Vocabulary Part 1

Jennifer Kent-Walsh & Cathy Binger

9/27/2016 4:09 AM

For the next few posts, we’ll explore common approaches to building language for children who use aided AAC. Today, we’ll begin with core vocabulary.

What does it mean to use a core vocabulary approach to AAC?

The basic principle of using a core vocabulary approach to language development is to primarily focus on using a relatively small group (several hundred) of commonly used words, and to use them across many contexts. Some of the benefits of this approach are that the child can communicate in many contexts using the same vocabulary, and the location of the vocabulary never moves on the AAC display. For example, the word “is” is always located in the same place, which means that over time, this should speed up communication as the child memorizes where each word is located.

Teaching language using aided AAC is a tricky business. Of course we want to provide children with every opportunity to achieve full linguistic competence, but AAC technologies – no tech, low tech, or high tech – are the bottleneck for achieving this goal. Somehow, children who are preliterate have to find a way to access the vocabulary that they need to try to produce the sentences that are in their heads. Find a way for a preliterate child to quickly and easily locate thousands of words is an issue that has been nagging AAC interventionists for decades.

Core Vocabulary: A Pragmatic Approach

The core vocabulary approach takes a frank, pragmatic view of this state of affairs, trying to do as much as possible with today’s technologies. Instead of memorizing thousands of locations, children are initially taught to locate a small corpus of flexible words. This expands as the child memorizes symbol locations, with a goal of achieving automatic retrieval as quickly as possible. By teaching the child to locate a relatively small but highly flexible corpus of words, children may not reach full linguistic competence, but at least they can achieve a level of linguistic independence.

In the next post, we’ll examine the ways in which the core vocabulary approach does and does not adhere to normal language development.

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