A first approach for using verbs in a 15 Core AAC system for strong beginners.

Homepage Verbs

3 verbs to start with

When I first began looking at AAC software, I was surprised by how chalked full of buttons most of the "beginning" page sets had. Many words are included in these sets like "DO", and "COME", "HAVE", and more - on the homepage, as essential words.

Maybe for kids with better auditory processing, who understand much of what they hear - that might be OK. But for TT, who has auditory processing problems as well as probable apraxia in addition to her autism, we only needed the very basics: words she really needed.

Choosing the main verbs to use for the Talker was easy: she quickly saw that this device was a way to tell us what she WANTS! While we've moved beyond that in our therapy sessions are are trying to work on things like sharing, commenting, numeracy, etc., I have to admit she still mainly uses it to tell us what she wants. We use it to explain things to her, as well. We have gotten a lot of mileage out of these 3 verbs:

want

eat

go

Building Blocks

We also have "drink" on the homepage, just not as prominent. You might notice that the drink graphic is actually just a variation of the "eat" one, with the liquid sign underneath. That is very intentional! In terms of language acquisition, it's important to give the child the idea that they are ingesting something. What that thing is, can be further described visually, as you see in the drink graphic. But it's important that the 2 graphics seem related, because that way the child is building upon their visual language, rather than having to remember a bunch of graphics for different concepts that are actually related.

Many kids may need to omit the "I" from the homepage setup, but as TT was already on stage 4 PECS, she didn't have any trouble putting "I want" together. But for any child who might be struggling a bit more, and who you are just trying to get communicating, adding the pronoun could certainly come later. TT's older sister complains often that we've omitted articles like "A" and "TO"... I try to explain that these words aren't important for a beginning language learner, which isn't an argument that works on all 10 year olds who spend hours a week diagramming sentences!

While we have some other words that are technically verbs on our homepage, the 3 verbs want, eat and go are the power words that get the most usage, by far. It was a great way for us to start, and if you find yourself wondering how your child is going to choose from a myriad of supposedly essentially verbs - I'd suggest starting with these 3, and expand from there as you find ways to actually use the other words!