In mother-tongue learning, speech begins with a one-word stage of mostly:

1. NCERT describes how children's speech progresses. 2. In mother-tongue learning it progresses from a one-word, mostly nouns, stage. 3. It then moves to multi-word sentences with verbs, auxiliaries, determiners, adjectives and prepositions. 4. So the one-word stage is mostly nouns. **Why not the others:** Verbs, adjectives and pronouns appear in the later multi-word sentences. _Source: NCERT, Position Paper of the National Focus Group on Teaching of English (2006), section "3.7.1 Using existing cognitive and linguistic resources", PDF p. 25 (ncert.nic.in/pdf/focus-group/english.pdf)_