I can’t pretend I have academic studies, or know what advice to give you. But I see all the time that people discourage introducing more than one system to a child. Most kids are going to choose just one anyway, and you might see that two (or twenty!) do more for a specific person than one. Most autistic adults I know that chose their own system change AAC based on the situation.
I use LAMP Words for Life (and very soon my device will arrive with, Unity!!).
Oh wait no–I use touchchat.
Hold up, I’m a proloquo2go kind of person.
Nevermind, I’m a typer.
Look at me! I’m signing to you.
Holy cow…I’m tracing letters on the palm of your hand. I’m gesturing. I’m using a core board plus letterboard. A partner assisted scanning book comes out of nowhere.
Let’s talk about how all these systems help me.
LAMP: I’m the fastest here, and I have to type the fewest things. Unity is even better for me, as I usea big variety of vocabulary.
TouchChat: To be honest, I only pull this out for our Alexa, but the built in vocab for that is awesome.
Proloquo2go: Most of my kids I’ve taught have proloquo, so I’m pretty familiar. My speed tanks here and I get frustrated looking for nouns, but I use it because it’s on my phone and apple watch! It’s great when I suddenly need to communicate something and my tablet is far away
Typing: Gets me the most respect in public. Is faster than LAMP WFL if I haven’t used it in a while. I can use flipwriter to communicate across the table in a restaurant when it’s loud.
Sign language: Easily the language that I have the easiest time expressing myself in, even though I’m barely intermediate and it’s my third language. I don’t need to bring anything with me. However, I know exactly one person who signs right now, and they are terrible about forgetting vocab and getting confused by my weird grammar, which frustrates me.
Tracing and morse: I do it in bed in the dark and that’s about it, but communicating at night when it’s dark is an interesting thing to think about for an AAC communicator. Lots of people plug in devices at night, so they’re not available.
Gesture: Fast, universal, don’t have to explain AAC, still there when language vacates my head completely. Kind of sucks tbh, but I do see people discouraging gesture (“say it on your talker”), which is super weird to me.
PODD: great when executive function is going haywire and I need to think really concretely (I’m telling you something–it’s about now–etc). Soooo expensive though. I really need to find someone who already has the CD’s.
Core boards: Can be stashed around the house. I can make personalized ones easily.
So that’s that. Idk. Think about it. Obviously if you’re an individual or parent you probably don’t want to shell out the money for all of these, but see if your SLP can offer a few at once and see what happens. Sign and core boards are free!
**honorable mention to CoughDrop, where it’s easy to make really specific boards, and you can populate a board by making a list of words instead of entering each one individually. There’s also some great premade robust core sets. The keyboard has been essentially unusable to me though, so it’s out of the running right now. You can hook up a bluetooth keyboard, but it still is slow in recognizing my keystrokes. It has a super long free trial, so check it out if you have a non-speller or slow speller.**
talking in every way possible 