Social communication in Grid vocabularies

In this blog, our AAC Content Specialist, Anita, and AAC Content Developer and SLT, Eva, explore how Grid vocabularies can support communication in social interactions. They highlight the wide range of words and phrases available in Grid – and how personalising these tools can make communication easier, more meaningful and more enjoyable during this social time of year.

 

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We are coming up to the end of 2025, and for many of us this time of year can feel busy, with many social activities! This might be with people we know well, like friends and family, or it could be with loved ones who we see less frequently. We may also meet new people at events related to work, hobbies or festive celebrations.  

Grid vocabularies have a wide range of words and phrases to support social communication, and these can be personalised to make them as useful and meaningful as possible for the person using AAC.  

Super Core

In Super Core, the Chat grids offer individual words and phrases that can be used in different social situations, with simple greetings and useful phrases like “hi” and “thank you.” 

 

The Teen and Adult version of Super Core has a Conversation grid, with phrases to start and extend an interaction by asking and responding to questions, commenting, agreeing or disagreeing with your conversation partner and more. You can even choose from the wrap up column to pick the perfect ending to your chat. 

The grid is designed to mirror the structure of a conversation, with greetings and opening questions on the left of the grid and phrases to close a conversation on the right of the grid. This area of Super Core is great for supporting natural, everyday conversations with familiar people.

The Messages grid contains a range of commonly used phrases, and each colour-coded heading jumps to additional phrases within that category. The ‘me’ and ‘you’ sections can be personalised ahead of time and are great for chatting with new people, as they include lots of questions and responses to help get to know someone.  The ‘like’ grid contains a range of opinions which can be useful in all sorts of conversations and also includes the phrase “I love you.”  

 

When catching up with people, you may also want to ask about their news and share your own. The News grids in Super Core can help with this. In the child vocabulary, this grid has blank cells that can be personalised ahead of time with any news and stories the user might like to share.  

The Teen and Adult version of the News grid features core words alongside topic-specific ‘fringe’ words, to flexibly build up phrases like “what you do last weekend?” The phrase list allows you to save your news ahead of time or to save stories for future use, and includes sentence starters like “At the weekend …” to help structure your news.   

Voco Chat

The Chat section, accessible from the home grid of Voco Chat, has a great selection of phrases to help start, extend and close a conversation. There are jumps at the bottom of each column which lead you to more of each type of phrase. The grid is designed to support a natural conversation from left to right, with greetings in the left-hand column and ways to end a conversation on the right.

You can also pre-save news and photos in Voco Chat, via Can I tell you something > A story. These template grids are initially set up with useful prompts to help structure your story, like ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘what happened’. You can fill in details by editing each cell and adding your own photograph, like below.  

Aphasia Duo 

The Chatting grid in Aphasia Duo 9 provides phrases for a range of communication reasons, such as asking questions, giving information, fixing misunderstandings and closing the conversation.

Aphasia Duo 16 divides Chatting up into additional subsections, depending on who you are talking to, as well as offering more phrases for a whole range of different communication reasons. This area of the grid set can be used for day-to-day chats with family and friends as well as conversations with less familiar people or specific interactions such as speaking to a health care professional. 

All of these grids use word list cells, which are very easy to amend or update, so you can add phrases that will be relevant to use with your communication partners.  

There is also a My news section in both Aphasia Duo 9 and Aphasia Duo 16, which offers space to add personal photos and stories, similar to Voco Chat. You can add as much or as little information to each news story as you like. This is a great way to reconnect with family or friends that you haven’t seen recently and share recent life news and events.