When considering motivational messages, it is important that the content reflects age appropriate language. Most preschoolers do not say “I want more milk please” and the average teenager speaks differently with friends than with adults. Students want to sound like their peers. Listen to other students or ask peers to provide age appropriate messages. University of Nebraska-Lincoln has core vocabulary lists for young children to adults - http://aac.unl.edu/.

Vocabulary selection can impact how the student is viewed by their communication partner. For example, a preponderance of “I messages” (e.g., “I want to go outside, I want to wear that”) may have a tendency to turn the listener off. Keeping the communicative intent of those messages but rewording them to be more engaging can have a positive impact on listener response (e.g. Let’s go outside!, Purple is my favorite color—I want to wear my purple shirt today”).

Another decision to make when selecting vocabulary for a student’s communication system is whether to use words, phrases or sentences. Each message type has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage to a word based system is that the student can say what they want in the way they want. The drawback is that it takes time to compose messages word-by-word. While using phrases or sentences can speed up message composition, the student may be limited by vocabulary that does not exactly match the message they wish to communicate. For example, they might be thirsty for chocolate milk but only have a generic message requesting milk. First they would use their generic milk message. Then they would have to find a way to clarify that they wanted chocolate milk. In a phrase-based system, this could be exceedingly difficult. Thus the advantage to phrases and sentences is potentially improving the speed of communication. The disadvantage would be whether the selected messages are specific enough to meet the student’s needs.

The most versatile communication system has a combination of words or even letters to create novel words and phrases or sentences of the most frequently used messages. The addition of clarifying messages (“That’s not exactly what I meant”) helps clear up communication breakdowns even more.

Vocabulary Representation

Unless the student has good reading skills, the vocabulary selected will need to be represented with some type of symbol. Examples include photos, line drawings, Picture Communication Symbols (PCS™), Unity® Symbols, SymbolStix®, DynaSyms® or other symbol sets (Imagine Symbols©, PixAide™ rebus symbols, etc.). Picture Communication Symbols are those used with the popular Boardmaker® software from Mayer-Johnson. Many assume that boards made with these or any other symbol set will be easy for the student to understand and interpret. One way to “see” these as the nonreader “sees” them is to print the symbols without the accompanying text. Using this version, try to decipher what the pictures represent. Present the wordless version to someone who is not familiar with this program and ask them to name all the pictures/messages shown. It is highly likely that you will come up with some very interesting answers. It is believed that one of the reasons for this is that when literate individuals encounter these boards, they look past the pictures to the text. This is in no way meant to discredit the Picture Communication Symbols or any other picture set, it is just to create an awareness that pictures are not necessarily easy to understand if the individual using them can not read.