Ming from Agents of Speech explains why children with language delays get stuck on nouns and concrete words like colors and numbers. These words are easy to map to real things, so kids stay there instead of moving toward sentences. The same pattern happens when learning a second language.
First part is words. All children, all people, they all started learning language with nouns. Those are the words that we refer to a real object in the real world. Real world object that we can see concretely. Right. And it might be that it's a noun object. It could be that it's a color, a concept, a number and stuff. And that's why you see a lot of children who are delayed. They're stuck on the nouns or stuck on the words, stuck on the concepts. They stuck on those things that they can see, they can touch and easily understand. And all of us, if we're learning a second language or a third language, those are the words that we tackle first, because it's tangible. So.
