The development of verbs in children is a critical aspect of language development and plays a significant role in their overall linguistic and cognitive development. Verb development is multifaceted and influenced by innate abilities, environmental factors and social interactions.
Verbs specifically help a child communicate about events in the world, by combining words to form sentences. The process involves several stages starting from early infancy and continuing throughout the preschool years.
First words are often nouns but verbs soon follow. Verbs are words for actions. Early verb usage includes high frequency verbs such as - go, eat, come and play. The choice of verb determines many of the grammatical forms in a sentence and the more verbs used the more advanced the grammatical skills.
Between 18-36 months children begin to combine 2 words forming basic phrases using verbs- e.g., want cookie, go play. They will have approximately 40 verbs in their vocabulary and will then begin to use short sentences e.g., mommy go work. Children with no verbs will not be able to build sentences, and will be at risk for problems with language development.
As they develop they will experiment with verb tenses e.g., goed/went and use subordinate clauses e.g., I went to sleep after my bath and verb phrases e.g., He is coming to school.
Overgeneralization is common e.g., applying regular verb rules to irregular verbs- eated/ate.
There are ways to help your child learn new verbs-
Children understand a word before they can begin to use it, so knowing what verbs they can understand is useful. You can keep a list of verbs they can understand and say and introduce a few new ones each month.
Repeat them frequently to help them learn them.
Associate actions with daily activities e.g., use the relevant verbs while bathing such as pour, wash, splash, clean, dry.
Try to do the actions while you say the verb in short sentences as this helps your child remember the new word and its meaning e.g., I'm pushing the trolley.
Repeat, repeat and repeat some more to create opportunities to hear the new verb used correctly.
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