Fringe vocabulary

Also called Fringe words, Extended vocabulary, Topic vocabulary

The specific words core cannot supply: names, places, foods, interests. The part of the vocabulary that makes it this person's.

What it is

Fringe vocabulary is everything that isn't core: the nouns and specific words that belong to a topic, a place or a person. Grandma, spaghetti, wheelchair, Liverpool, dinosaur, Wednesday, the name of the dog. Each one is used rarely compared with "want" or "go", but when it is needed nothing else will do.

Fringe is where the person's own life goes into the system, and it is the part that has to keep changing as their life does.

Who it can help

Everyone who uses AAC. A person whose board has only core words can talk about anything in general and nothing in particular; a person whose board has only fringe words can name things and do nothing with them. Both halves are needed, and the fringe half is the one that gets neglected once the initial setup is done.

It matters most for adults, whose fringe is enormous and specific: medications, colleagues, the names of grandchildren, the football team. A device set up for a child and never updated leaves an adult with a child's fringe. See adult vocabulary.

How it works

Fringe words are organised by topic, on separate pages or folders of a device, or on communication boards for particular situations. A good system keeps the core words in the same place on every page and swaps only the fringe, so the person never loses "not" or "help" when they go to the food page.

Adding fringe is the ongoing job of the people around the person. It means noticing what they want to say and can't, and putting the word in. A family that adds ten words a month has, in a year, built a vocabulary no supplier could. See personal vocabulary and personalising a vocabulary.

Getting started

Keep a running list, on the fridge or in a notes app, of every word the person needed this week and didn't have. Add them on Sunday. That is the whole method.

Start with people and places. Names of family, friends, carers and pets, with photographs where the person prefers them, and the places they go in a normal week. Then their interests, in their own words.

Check the fringe is current. A page of last year's teachers, a food the person now hates, a phone number that changed: stale fringe teaches a person that the board is not really theirs.

Where to get help

A speech and language therapist will help decide what goes in and where, but the people who know the fringe are the family and the person, and most AAC services will show them how to add words themselves. Communication Matters and ACE Centre publish guidance on vocabulary selection.