Introduction: The First Word Fallacy
We all celebrate it: a child's first word. That momentous occasion is almost always marked by a simple noun. "Mama," "dada," "milk," "ball"—these are the celebrated building blocks of a toddler's vocabulary, as noted by child development experts at Associates in Pediatric Therapy. We cheer, we record the date, and we eagerly await the next noun.
But this natural focus on a child's first nouns overlooks the true engine of language. While naming objects is a crucial first step, it's not what powers the leap from single words to fluent sentences. The unsung heroes of communication are verbs. They provide the essential framework for everything from a toddler's first commands to an adult's mastery of a new language.
Verbs Are the Engine of Grammar, Not Just More Words
A vocabulary of nouns is just a list of things. A vocabulary that includes verbs is a toolkit for building ideas. Verbs are necessary to form any sentence. As the experts at Total Communication point out, a child saying "Jane the ball" is just naming things; it's a meaningless fragment. But when a verb is added—"Jane kicks the ball"—it becomes a complete thought.
A child's verb use is one of the most powerful predictors of their future grammatical skill. Research cited by emergepediatrictherapy.com shows that 2-year-old children who use a greater variety of verbs have more advanced grammatical skills just six months later.
The difference between typically developing toddlers and those who are late to talk is starkly illustrated by their verb use. According to Banter Speech & Language, late-talking toddlers use an average of about 3 verbs, compared to almost 46 for their typically developing peers. This verb deficit is often the primary bottleneck holding a child back from moving beyond simple naming. This isn't just a vocabulary gap; it's a structural deficit that prevents children from building the grammatical house that nouns are meant to furnish.
So, when should parents be concerned? According to speech pathology experts, a child having fewer than two verbs at 24 months, fewer than ten by 27 months, or fewer than 46 by 30 months may signal a risk for language delay.
The Real Reason Verbs Are So Hard to Learn
If verbs are so important, why do children learn nouns first? The answer lies in a fundamental mismatch between how verbs and nouns connect to a child's reality. According to the "natural partitions hypothesis," concrete nouns are easier because they often refer to "highly cohesive" objects that a pre-linguistic infant can already recognize. A ball is a ball; it's a distinct, tangible thing.
Verbs, in contrast, describe transient events and relationships. As detailed in a review on optimal verb learning contexts, a single event, like a game of catch, can be described by many different verbs: "throwing," "catching," or "playing." The link between the word and the action is less transparent. The challenge isn't seeing the action, but correctly labeling which part of the action the word refers to.
As linguist Dedre Gentner powerfully summarized the challenge:
It is not perceiving relations but packaging and lexicalizing them that is difficult.
How to Supercharge Verb Learning (It's Not What You Think)
Helping a child learn verbs isn't about flashcards or drills. The research points to a few powerful, and sometimes counter-intuitive, strategies for parents.
- Narrate, Don't Interrogate: Model language by narrating, not quizzing. A common instinct is to ask a child, "What are you doing?" But experts at Associates in Pediatric Therapy advise against this. Instead, they recommend "parallel talk," where you narrate the child's actions. For example, "You are stacking the blocks! Wow, you're building a tower." This models the correct language in context without the pressure of a question.
- Get Specific: Use diverse, descriptive verbs instead of generic ones. Replace "general all-purpose" verbs like 'do,' 'put,' or 'make' with more descriptive action words. Instead of "Let's do the dishes," say "Let's wash the dishes." Research highlighted by Banter Speech & Language shows that the diversity of verbs a parent uses is the single most important factor in a child's own verb vocabulary growth.
- Avoid "Baby Talk" Shortcuts: Use full grammatical sentences to provide crucial learning cues. It can feel natural to simplify your language into "telegraphic speech" (e.g., "put shoe," "daddy go car"). However, research on verb learning shows this is counterproductive. Using short, ungrammatical phrases removes the very grammatical cues, like tense markers (-ed, -ing) and sentence structure, that children need to understand a verb's function and how it fits into a sentence. Full, grammatical sentences are better for learning.
The "Verb Hack" Works for Adult Language Learners, Too
This focus on verbs isn't just for toddlers. The same principle provides a powerful shortcut for anyone learning a new language. This principle is a powerful shortcut for anyone learning a new language, as highlighted in a popular online forum where a user shared a 'high ROI' strategy learned from a linguist friend.
The logic is simple: if you don't understand the predicate of a sentence—the part containing the verb—you won't understand the sentence at all. The recommendation is to learn 200-300 core verbs to rapidly accelerate comprehension. While a language has far more nouns than verbs, learning the top 1,000 verbs provides much greater "coverage" and functional understanding than learning the top 1,000 nouns. Verbs give you the framework to understand and build sentences about anything.
Conclusion: From Naming to Connecting
The journey into language is more than just learning the names of things. The real leap—from a handful of nouns to true communication—is powered by verbs. They are the words that connect ideas, tell stories, and give structure to our thoughts.
The next time you help a child learn to talk or tackle a new language yourself, will you focus on the names of things, or on the actions that bring them to life?