There is a particular month that catches most families. The early novelty has worn off, the first few words came quickly, and then everything stopped. Same four words, every day, for weeks. It is the point where a lot of communication boards quietly go in a drawer.
This is a plateau, and plateaus are normal. They are also usually about the environment around the board rather than about the child. Four things are worth trying, roughly in this order.
1. Check whether the board has become a vending machine
This is the most common cause by a distance. If nearly every exchange is your child requesting something and an adult delivering it, the board has one function, and a tool with one function stops growing.
The fix is to model words that get you nothing. Uh oh. Yuck. Funny. Look. Silly. Commenting is the doorway to everything past requests, and it only opens if adults go first.
2. Add one word, not twenty
The urge at a plateau is to expand the board. Resist it. Pick a single new word, put it somewhere your child's hand already goes, and use it yourself thirty times over a week before expecting anything back.
3. Change the room, not the vocabulary
A word that only ever appears at the kitchen table lives at the kitchen table. Take the same four words to the bath, the car, the park, a grandparent's house. Often what looks like a stall is a word that has simply never been let out of one room.
4. Break something on purpose
Sabotage is a real technique, and it feels rude the first few times. Hand over the sealed container. Give the crayon with no paper. Start the routine and stop halfway. You are not being unkind, you are creating a genuine reason to say something, which is the one ingredient that cannot be modelled.
Do it lightly, once or twice a day, and always resolve it quickly.
What a plateau looks like from the other side
Six weeks of nothing followed by a jump is the normal shape of this. Language does not arrive in a straight line for any child, and it does not arrive in a straight line on a board either.
Try this
Count how many of your own board taps over a week were requests and how many were comments. If the split is worse than half and half, that is your plateau, and it is yours to fix rather than your child's.