YouTube video by Ming @ Agents of Speech (Nov 21, 2023) arguing that speech-delayed children often lack functional vocabulary—especially verbs—which causes over-reliance on imitation (parroting) and prevents sentence construction. Ming notes that children may know many nouns (e.g., sun, moon, planets, sea animals, dinosaurs) but without action words (verbs) they struggle to form sentences.
Root cause is because there aren't enough vocabulary, especially for verbs. So what happens very quickly is that because the child doesn't have enough words in the bank, the next thing they can only do is to imitate whatever you say become parrots. So there's like from level 0 to level 1 is from non verbal to single words. But the problem is that after they learn imitation they rely on that skill too much and therefore they didn't learn words to their exact meaning. And every time they don't know anything, they just look at your mouth and try to copy that. Therefore you don't have enough vocabs. You might say no, my kid has so many vocabs he knows like the sun, the moon, all the planets, the sea animals, dinosaurs even. But the problem is those aren't functional words. If they don't have enough verbs, action words, it's going to be very difficult to construct sentences.
