How AAC vocabulary systems differ
Open five AAC boardsets and you’ll find five different philosophies. None of them is “the right one” — they encode different beliefs about how language is learned. Knowing which philosophy a boardset follows tells you how it wants to be taught, and what will break if you rearrange it.
Core-word systems
The organizing idea: a few hundred flexible words do most of the talking (see What is a core words board?). Core stays on the home board in fixed positions; fringe vocabulary hangs off it in folders. Public AAC’s starter boards follow this approach, as do many open boardsets — it’s the most common baseline in classroom AAC.
What matters when using one: position stability. The value compounds as motor patterns form, so resist reorganizing the core grid.
Motor-planning systems (the LAMP approach)
LAMP — Language Acquisition through Motor Planning — is a therapy approach most associated with LAMP Words for Life, a commercial vocabulary by PRC-Saltillo. The organizing idea is that saying a word should be a consistent motor pattern, not a visual search: every word keeps one unique button sequence from day one, on a grid that never rearranges. Beginners start with most cells hidden rather than with a smaller grid, so revealing more vocabulary never moves anything.
What matters: never relocate buttons, ever — the sequence is the word. If you adopt a motor-planning boardset, grid size changes and “tidying up” are the two ways to destroy months of learning.
Pragmatic-organization systems (the PODD approach)
PODD — Pragmatic Organisation Dynamic Display — organizes language by communicative intent rather than by word class: pages branch from openers like “I’m telling you something”, “something’s wrong”, “I want something”. Developed by Gayle Porter, PODD is distributed through licensed templates and training, and is especially associated with partner-assisted communication books as well as devices.
What matters: the navigation is the system. PODD’s power comes from predictable conversational pathways a partner can model fluently; cherry-picking a few pages out of it loses the point.
Taxonomic and activity-based layouts
The oldest approach: nouns grouped by category (animals, food, places) or pages built per activity (snack time, circle time). Intuitive for adults, and useful as fringe organization — but as the whole system it caps expression at requesting and labeling, which is why modern systems lead with core or pragmatics and keep taxonomy one layer down.
A note on what this library hosts
LAMP Words for Life, PODD templates, TouchChat page sets, and Proloquo vocabularies are commercial, copyrighted works — they can’t be shared here, and uploads of them are rejected in review. What this library will host is openly licensed and original work: core-word boards, communication books, and boardsets their authors chose to share. The ideas above, though, are free to learn from — and worth understanding before you build or adopt any boardset.