Strategy
Prikkeltaal (literally “stimulus language” or “stimulus talk”) is a communication framework developed to give people a shared vocabulary for discussing sensory experiences. Sensory processing is internal, subjective, and hard to articulate, especially for people who have never been asked to describe it. Prikkeltaal provides the words.
The concept was developed collaboratively as part of De Sensatie van een Goed Leven (The Sensation of a Good Life), the four-year participatory action research project at UMCG. Key contributors include Ben Willems (OQTOO), Paul Veld, and Majella van Raalte, working alongside researchers, carers, parents, and autistic people. See De Sensatie van een Goed Leven for the project history.
Prikkeltaal is not a clinical instrument. It is a practical communication tool — a way for a carer and the person they support, a teacher and a student, a parent and a child to name what is happening sensorily and talk about it in concrete terms.
When it applies
Prikkeltaal is relevant whenever sensory experience needs to be communicated:
- Building a prikkelprofiel — an individual sensory profile requires language for the experiences it maps.
- Using Prikkelbalans — stimulus balance — recognising and communicating which zone you are in requires words for what you are sensing.
- Conversations between carers, teachers, family members, and the person themselves about what is helping and what is not.
- Multi-disciplinary team meetings where professionals from different backgrounds (OT, psychology, education, care) need to describe the same sensory phenomena without talking past each other.
How it works
Prikkeltaal operates at three levels:
1. Naming the stimuli (prikkels)
This framework distinguishes between two broad categories of stimuli:
Sensory stimuli (zintuiglijke prikkels) — input perceived through the senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, vestibular sense, proprioception, and interoception. See De zintuigen — the senses for the eight-sense taxonomy.
Brain stimuli (hersenprikkels) — thoughts, emotions, language, and cognitive demands. Not sensory in the traditional sense, but they compete for the same processing resources and contribute to overall load. A noisy classroom and a difficult maths problem both draw on system capacity. Prikkeltaal gives both the same root word to acknowledge this.
When someone says “ik ben overprikkeld” (I am overstimulated), the overload might come from sensory input, cognitive demand, emotional stress, or a combination. The vocabulary avoids false separation between sensory and cognitive/emotional experience.
2. Describing processing patterns
Prikkeltaal draws on Dunn’s four types of sensory processing to describe how people process stimuli, not just what they encounter:
- Waarnemer (Observer) — high threshold, passive response. May not notice obvious stimuli.
- Zoeker (Seeker) — high threshold, active response. Actively seeks more stimulation.
- Sensor (Sensor) — low threshold, passive response. Notices stimuli intensely but does not actively manage them.
- Vermijder (Avoider) — low threshold, active response. Notices stimuli intensely and actively reduces them.
This is descriptive, not diagnostic. Rather than “your child is a sensory seeker,” more useful language is: “in this situation, she seems to need more input — more movement, more pressure, more sound. That’s her way of keeping her system alert.”
3. Communicating arousal states
The prikkelbalans four-zone framework (green, orange, red, blue) provides a third vocabulary layer for the resulting nervous system state:
- Groen (green) — balanced, alert, processing capacity matches input
- Oranje (orange) — rising stress, early signs of dysregulation
- Rood (red) — crisis, fight/flight/freeze
- Blauw (blue) — understimulated, sluggish, withdrawn
Together, these three layers — what (stimuli), how (processing pattern), and where (arousal state) — form a complete vocabulary for sensory experience across settings, age groups, and verbal abilities (with visual and gestural adaptations for non-speaking people).
What to watch for
Prikkeltaal is a tool, not a test. Do not use it to label someone (“she’s a Vermijder”) in a fixed or limiting way. Processing patterns vary across senses, contexts, and time. The language describes what is happening now, not what the person is.
Adaptation for non-verbal people. The verbal vocabulary needs visual, gestural, and observational counterparts for non-speaking people. A carer using prikkeltaal observationally — “I notice he’s covering his ears and pulling back; that looks like sensor-response to the noise level” — uses the framework well even without the person’s verbal input. Where possible, centre the person’s own communication, including non-verbal communication.
Cultural and linguistic translation. Prikkeltaal was developed in Dutch. The concepts need cultural as well as linguistic translation as they move into other languages and contexts. The English equivalents (stimulus, processing, arousal, balance) carry different connotations than the Dutch originals. See Prikkelverwerking glossary for the current bilingual terminology.
Documentation gap
Note for wiki curators: Prikkeltaal is a core Dutch concept, but its detailed mechanics — the full vocabulary taxonomy, the communication exercises, the practical training materials — are not yet fully documented in this wiki. The concept was developed within the SGL project and exists primarily in Dutch-language resources and in the project team’s working materials. A priority task is to work with the original developers (Ben Willems, Paul Veld, Majella van Raalte) to document prikkeltaal comprehensively, including practical examples and training guidance. This page provides the framework; the detail needs filling.
Evidence notes
Evidence level: practitioner-consensus. Prikkeltaal was developed through a four-year participatory research process involving 50+ network partners. It is grounded in Dunn’s validated sensory processing model and the lived experience of autistic people, carers, and professionals. No separate validation study of prikkeltaal as a communication tool exists, but the conceptual components (Dunn’s model, arousal-state frameworks) have peer-reviewed support.