Ming explains why speech-delayed children need verbs, not just nouns. Without them, kids can't combine words into sentences. Teaching verbs first, then adding objects and subjects around them, helps children build flexible language.
The child needs to have enough words in order to mix them together. But here's the biggest problem. Most children who are delayed or on the spectrum the problem is that they have too many nouns instead of having not enough verbs. Why are verbs so important? You know how we always say subject, verb, object verb is in the middle and some languages the verb is elsewhere, right? But most of the time in English is that the verb phrase is the phrase that is right after the verbs. If you think about every sentence that we say ming wearing glasses, the wearing becomes the verb and and it glues the the subject and the object together. Or else you can say ming glasses and it doesn't make sense. So how do you teach children with gestalt language processing? Teach as many verbs as as you can. And then once they know the verbs, you can put the objects behind it or the subject in front of it and slowly build it out and make sure they can use those words flexibly.
