What is a core words board?
Open Public AAC for the first time and the starter board leads with words like I, want, more, not, and go — not “sandwich” or “playground”. That’s deliberate, and it’s the single most important idea in AAC vocabulary design.
Core versus fringe
Roughly 80% of everyday speech is built from only a few hundred words — pronouns, verbs, little words like more, stop, that. Linguists call these core words. They work in almost any situation: “want that”, “more”, “not go”, “you do it”.
Everything else — the thousands of specific nouns like sandwich, dinosaur, grandma’s house — is fringe vocabulary. Fringe words are powerful in the right moment but useless outside it.
A board of twenty snack photos lets someone choose a snack. A board of twenty core words lets someone protest, request, direct, comment, and joke — all day. That’s why core words earn the prime positions.
What this means for your board
- Keep core words stable. Motor memory does the heavy lifting: when want never moves, saying “I want” stops being a search and becomes a movement.
- Add fringe in folders. Food, places, and people belong one tap away, grouped in sub-boards, so they never crowd out the words that work everywhere.
- Start small if needed, but start with core. Public AAC’s starter sizes (2×3, 3×3, 4×5) are all core-led subsets of the same board, so growing the grid later doesn’t reshuffle what’s already learned.