The High-Frequency Verb Library

28 no-preparation, verb-based workouts using high-frequency verbs in present, past, and future tense at the sentence level

The more research we read, and the more we work with families, the more we find ourselves focusing on verbs (words like “put”, “do”, “make”, “fall”, “sleep”, “find”, “see”, "know", "break", "write", "throw" etc).

• Verbs emerge later than nouns and are harder to acquire. Early nouns refer to concrete entities (e.g. "bear", "Mum"). But verbs are often about transient events (e.g. Gleitman et al., 2005).
• Compared to children without language disorders:
  • late-talking toddlers have problems learning, remembering and using verbs (e.g. Widfuhr et al., 2002);
  • late-talking toddlers use dramatically fewer verbs – an average of about 3 compared with almost 46 for typically developing toddlers (Ellis Weismer et al., 2001); and
  • older children with a history of language disorders have problems using verbs correctly. For example, they often struggle with regular past tense verbs (e.g. “jumped“), irregular past tense verbs (e.g. “drew”, “fell”, “broke”, “went”) and auxiliary verbs (e.g. “have”, and "does") (e.g. Leonard, 2014).
• Two-year olds with only a few verbs in their vocabulary are at an increased risk of language disorders (Olswang et al., 1998).
• Verbs are essential for many word combinations and all sentences. A lack of verbs means late-talking two-year olds are less likely to combine words than 16-month olds with the same size vocabulary (Ellis Weismer et al., 2001).
• Knowledge and use of different kinds of verbs may kick-start grammatical development (e.g. Tomasello, 2005). Researchers talk about verbs having a “privileged” role in sentence production (e.g. Bock & Levelt, 1994). A lack of verbs can prevent children from making complex sentences. This is why some therapy programs actively target verbs as a goal of speech-language intervention (e.g. Earle & Lowry, 2015).
• Typically developing monolingual children should have around 26-29 verbs at 21 months; and 81-87 verbs at 30 months (Dale & Fenson, 1996, Jorgenson et al., 2010, Hadley et al., 2016). If a child has: fewer than two verbs at 24 months; fewer than 10 verbs at 27 months; and fewer than 46 verbs at 30 months, he/or she has a verb inventory smaller than that of children in the 10th percentile and may be at risk of a language delay (Hadley et al., 2016).
• At 21 months, girls tend to have more verbs than boys. But boys tend to catch up by 30 months (Hadley et al., 2016).
• Verb diversity can predict later grammatical complexity. A child’s spontaneous production of verbs at 24 months is a good predictor of the types of sentences he or she will be able to say six months later. Specifically, the diversity of verbs used is a better predictor of grammatical outcomes than common noun diversity (Hadley et al., 2016).