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Project: Miss Piggy and the Monitors of Lexis

Purpose:

A look at Language Division for the Vocabulary Selectors and other Surrounders of AAC Users.

Words, like George Orwell's Pigs are NOT all equal. The entire lexis of the English language may be divided into three distinct groups of Common Core, each individual's Personal Core, and the rest, the Fringe collection.

Scenario:

Queen Piggy has just bought the latest PDA Smart Phone, but it's no better than her old one when it comes to text messaging. She still has to press a key four times just to type one letter.

Why not just two key-presses per whole word, like on Michael Reed's communication aid? At least for the words she says again and again? She's got things to do!

There are half a million words in Piggy's native tongue. She knows that a system with that many words in it would be too big, too slow, and un-learnable. She never uses half of the words anyway.

Piggy Summons the Professor

Piggy asks the Professor what he can do. 'No problem', he says, 'I'll do the Common Core today. We'll add your Personal Core when Percy has monitored you. The Monitors really are the best people to consult about vocabulary selection. You'll see what I mean when you meet them'.

The Monitors, Pinky, Percy and Porky are summoned to the Palace

They bring the Lexis filing cabinet with them.

When the Monitors Arrive, Miss Piggy Sees That...

Pinky's (Common Core) Drawer has 442 (522, more, less?) words in it.

Percy's (User Core) Drawer is empty, ready to be customised with Piggy's Personal Core.

Porky's (Fringe) Drawer contains the entire lexis (apart from Pinky's 442 Core Words) indexed and archived in it.

Miss Piggy: Recorded and Analysed

The Monitors record everything Miss Piggy says, and they count how many times each word is spoken. Index cards for the words that Piggy says the most are moved from the Porky Drawer to Piggy's Percy Drawer, and a report is sent to the Professor, so he can add Miss Piggy's Personal Core to her Core Text Messaging system.

Tutorial:

The Monitors give Piggy a PowerPoint replica of her Core Text PDA as a reference guide, and a set of flash cards with the icon sequence (file path) to each word printed on the cards, so she can practice her new system.

The Three Little Pigs' AAC Career:

Before the Three Pigs left home to make their own way in the world, they used to work with their Mum, who made her living hand-painting communication grids and flash cards. But these days most people can print out their own grids and cards, and the Three Pigs' time is freed up for the important tasks of language monitoring and teaching vocabulary selection skills.

As Monitors, they have conducted many controlled studies, where every word spoken, spelled, signed or gestured by various people, over periods of time, were recorded, counted and categorised. The Monitors know everything there is to know about word usage. Their studies taught them that everyone uses the same 250 words for over 80% of everything they say, and since then, all communication systems have included these words as a starter set of vocabulary.

Just a few few more core words than this (442 according to the AAC Institute) have been found to serve up to 98% of a person's communication needs, even though these words represent -0.01% of a language sample of 10,000 words (quote from memory - details to check and correct).

Testing: Is Pinkie Telling the Truth?

Bring your own script, any body of text you choose – e.g. a record of a conversation, a story, song lyrics – and use a bingo pen to check your words against our Common Core Vocabulary list (522 words). No more than 10-15% of your words should remain un-marked.

The Common Core Vocabulary list we use is a combination of several well known core words lists from language sample analyses, lists that are linked to from our Language homepage. We recently added a list named General Core Vocabulary (GVC) from the AAC Institute to our collection, but have not yet integrated these words into the existing combined list in our database.

Many pages on this site still state that all our resources are based on just one of the word lists - a list of the 329 most frequently occuring words from a sample of 3-4 years old speaking children. It was our starting point. See this list.