Guide

Core vocabulary explained

When people first meet AAC, they often imagine boards full of pictures of objects: a picture of an apple, a picture of a ball. Core vocabulary turns that idea gently on its head, and it is one of the most useful things a family can understand early. Here is what it means and why it matters so much.

What is core vocabulary?

Core vocabulary is a small set of high-frequency words that we use over and over, in almost every situation. Words like want, more, go, stop, help, like, that, and finished.

What makes these words special is not what they name but how flexibly they work. The word more works at the dinner table, in the park, during a game, and at bedtime. Want, stop and help travel everywhere with a person, because they express intentions rather than point to single objects. A few hundred of these words can be recombined endlessly to say a huge range of things. That is why they sit at the heart of a good AAC system, and why teams build around them first.

Why do so few words matter so much?

Because of a well-established finding about how people actually talk. A small set of core words, only a few hundred of them, accounts for roughly 80 percent of everything we say in a typical day. Stop and picture your own last conversation. Most of it was made of little everyday words used again and again, with only the occasional specific noun.

That has a powerful practical meaning. If you teach a person a few hundred well-chosen core words, you have given them access to the large majority of everyday communication. You do not need thousands of pictures to have a real conversation. You need a compact, powerful set of words that combine, plus a way to add the specific ones that matter to this particular person.

Core words versus fringe words

The other half of the picture is fringe vocabulary. Fringe words are the specific ones tied to a topic or a moment: dinosaur, trampoline, the name of a favourite cartoon, a best friend's name. They are meaningful and motivating, and they absolutely belong in a person's system. But there are a great many of them, and each one tends to be useful only some of the time.

The healthiest approach is not core or fringe, it is both, in the right balance. Core words form the sturdy backbone that works all day. Fringe words are added generously around them to reflect what a person loves and lives. The mistake to avoid is building a whole system out of fringe nouns, because a board of object pictures can name things but struggles to say want, stop, again, or help me.

Why start with core rather than pictures of objects?

Because core words build genuine communication rather than labelling. Naming objects is a lovely early step, but on its own it does not let a person protest, request, comment, direct, or connect. Those things are what most of us communicate for, and they are carried by core words. Starting with core gives a person the tools to say no, to ask for more, to end something they dislike, and to share what they think. The evidence base supports teaching these powerful, reusable words early rather than waiting.

It can feel counterintuitive, because a word like that is harder to draw than an apple. But an abstract word learned in real use unlocks far more than a concrete one learned in isolation. Use the words yourself as you speak, in real moments, and their meaning becomes clear over time.

Why does keeping words in the same place matter?

Because our hands learn locations, not just meanings. When want lives in the same spot day after day, a person builds what is sometimes called motor memory for it, the same way you can type or find a light switch in the dark without looking. Moving words around resets that learning and makes every reach slower.

This is why good AAC systems keep core words in consistent, predictable places, even as fringe words are added and rearranged elsewhere. Resist the urge to tidy the layout every week. Stability is a feature, not a limitation. A person who always knows where their most important words live can speak faster, more fluently, and with far less effort.