Core Vocabulary Is the Part People Miss
The instinct when building a communication board is to fill it with nouns — foods, toys, activities — because those are the things a child obviously wants. It is also the single most common way a board ends up useless, because a vocabulary of nouns makes a child a requester and nothing else.
Core vocabulary is the small set of high-frequency words that make up the overwhelming majority of everything anyone says: go, stop, more, want, like, not, help, that, mine, do, put, turn. A few hundred core words cover roughly eighty percent of typical speech, and they are the words that let someone comment, refuse, joke, complain, and direct rather than only ask for things. Nouns — the fringe vocabulary — are added around that core, not the other way round.
This has a practical consequence for anyone choosing or arranging a system: a board whose words never move position matters more than a board with lots of pictures. Motor planning does a great deal of the work for an experienced user, and reorganising a layout resets it.
Modelling Is the Method
The technique that makes AAC work is aided language stimulation: the adult uses the system themselves while talking, pointing to the words as they say them, without requiring the child to respond. It is the AAC equivalent of the thousands of hours of speech a speaking child hears before their first word, and it is skipped far more often than it is done.
The volume required surprises people. A child gets years of spoken models before anyone expects a sentence; a child handed a device on Monday and asked to use it by Friday has had almost nothing. Modelling several times in every interaction, on the child's own system, for weeks before expecting output, is the normal shape of a successful start.
Two things to avoid. Do not make a child earn access — a communication system is not a reward and taking it away is taking away their voice. And do not turn it into a test by demanding "tell me what you want" before anything is handed over; requests are the easiest function to teach and the least interesting one to have, and a system used only for requesting is a system half-built.
Will AAC Stop My Child Talking?
No, and this is one of the few questions in the field with a clear answer. Reviews of the research have consistently found that introducing AAC does not suppress speech, and that most participants show gains in speech production alongside it. The mechanism people propose is straightforward: reducing the frustration and giving a model of language makes communication more likely, not less.
The related worry — that a child is "not ready" or should be given more time — is worth pushing back on too. There are no prerequisites a child must demonstrate before being given a way to communicate, and the waiting itself has costs: missed language exposure at the ages when it matters most, and the behaviour that predictably comes with having no way to say no.
Presume competence. Assuming a non-speaking child understands more than they can demonstrate is both the more respectful default and the safer one, because the alternative — assuming they understand little and giving them little — is unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling.
Where a Site Like Ours Fits
Honestly, at the edges. What our activities can do for a child who uses AAC is give a genuine reason to communicate — a turn to take, a choice to make, something to comment on — and build the receptive language, vocabulary, and social exchange skills that a system carries. Any activity here can be played with an adult modelling on the child's own device alongside it.
What we do not do is supply a system, evaluate a child, or represent an alternative to an evaluation. If you are searching for an AAC app because your child needs a way to communicate, the right next step is a speech-language pathologist with AAC experience — through a school team if the child is school-aged, or through a private clinic — who will trial systems with the child rather than recommend one from a description.
Funding and access are part of that conversation too, and an SLP will know the local route. It is a slower path than downloading something, and it produces a system the child will still be using in three years, which the downloaded one usually will not be.