A Recall Analysis of Core Word Lists over Children's Utterances for Augmentative and Alternative Communication

The vocabulary definition is of paramount importance in the customization of AAC devices, and it can be based on core word lists proposals. However, despite having the same purpose, there is no consensus among these core word lists. Therefore, in order to present evidence that helps to decide which list has a better recall, in this paper, 9 core word lists for children were reviewed; in addition, a Super List by merging these 9 lists was made. Then, several experiments were conducted for assessing the recall of these 10 lists on samples of 4 corpus from the CHILDES Corpus Database grouped by corpus and by age. The empirical results show that with a set of 100 words it is possible to recall 50% - 70% of childrens utterance. Moreover, the core word lists present a similar recall over the two samples but the recall of Super List varies according to the corpus and the childrens age. In summary, the importance of core word lists are confirmed, but results show that for an even better recall, fringe words and personal vocabulary must always be considered.