Ming from Agents of Speech explains gestalt language processing, where children learn language as whole phrases rather than individual words. Kids who do this often script and echo what they hear, behaviors common in autistic children. Teaching verbs helps them break phrases apart and build their own sentences.
We have this tendency to learn language and phrases and chunks. Right. For instance, when you learn a foreign language, what do you learn first? The numbers, the colors, greetings. You don't even know which is which. It's the same as children. If you go to kindergarten, what do they learn first? Numbers, animal names, their own nouns. They don't have that to glue those words together. Does it have autism implications? Yes and no. You see that autism children, they will script a lot, they will echo a lot. That's because the interests are different. Therefore, when they do have this gestalt language processing going on, what they do is that they take that language and they use it for self entertainment purposes. Does it mean that all of these are on the spectrum? No. If your child has this gestalt problem, you have to learn the glue which are the verbs in the language or else it's going to be very difficult for them to put the analytical units into phrases and sentences.
