Once again I come to the off topic of AAC to discuss shower thoughts with people smarter than me.

As with anything, some of us are better than others, but taken as a species I think we are pretty terrible at remembering nouns. There could be a few pages dedicated in the dictionary to all the nouns we use in place of the nouns we can't remember. Whatchamacallit, thingamajig, thingy, whatzadoozit, doohickey, etc. but we don't have any such vocab for forgotten actions; at least, none that I can think of (irony?). What word would you use if you were trying to say "I'm going to run to the store" but you couldn't think of the word "run?" If that ever happened to me, the sentence would come to a grinding halt, and I would probably sit there in frustrated awkward silence for a moment before making a walking gesture with my fingers. I think we don't have that (generic action) verb-substitute word because we don't need it. Because we don't forget verbs. Or very rarely do.

Why is that? Is this a universal human thing or is it unique to English?

There are 7 times more nouns than verbs in the English language (source) so obviously frequency plays a part, but I don't think it's a complete explanation. I don't forget nouns 7 times more frequently than verbs, it's more like 7,000 times more often. If it was a normal occurrence we would have some of those silly-sounding stand-in verbs for when it happens.

 

Here are my 2 cents worth.
I think that you are confuscating two things, vocabulary and word retention and retrieval.

Nouns came first. Humans attached sounds to objects first before applying sounds to actions. There are more nouns than verbs.
This means that there are more ways to identify an object.

Next comes word usage. If there is only one word to identify an object or action, you are going to use that word. Hence word retention and retrieval is more successful when there are fewer words to select.

As an example, let us take the word house.
How many words can you find to replace the word house?

Now, find substitutions for the words house and live in this sentence.

"We live in a small house by the sea."

 

I don't have any problems with nouns except on a pretty bad day, but proper nouns are starting to give me a real problem.

 

I think part of the problem comes down to wrote "remembering" of nouns instead of concentrating on
"Learning" about each particular noun.

Every noun has a "history", an "etymology", of it's origin.
I've always taken a minor interest in what some might consider trivial, meaningless blather,
but You might be amazed at how this minor effort can reveal an incredible amount of information
that can shed light on all kinds of seemingly disrelated subjects.

I believe that these interrelations make the basic nouns they are made up of virtually automatic,
and absolutely zero-effort to remember,
but I can't even remember my own Telephone-Number,
because it's just a string of arbitrary symbols, not a proper "name" for a distinctive real-thing.

Verbs, and many common "Colloquialisms" tend to be used on "Auto-Pilot",
no real though goes into selecting which one is the most appropriate for the situation.
Or even what the words literally mean when taken at face value.
The same goes for many "Speech-Mannerisms" and Regional-Accents.
.
.
.

 

Having language foundations rooted in Latin helps.

 

Now, find substitutions for the words house and live in this sentence.

"We live in a small house by the sea."

We reside in a bungalow by the sea.
We habitate a hovel by the sea.
We occupy an abode by the sea.
We stay in a shanty by the sea.
We lodge in a residence by the sea.
We dwell in a domicile by the sea.

 

We reside in a bungalow by the sea.
We habitate a hovel by the sea.
We occupy an abode by the sea.
We stay in a shanty by the sea.
We lodge in a residence by the sea.
We dwell in a domicile by the sea.

Nouns tend to be far more specific. In each of the examples offered above, the verb conveys largely the same idea, although some of them, like 'stay', might convey a notion of temporary residence that was not intended. But many of the alternatives for the noun bring to mind much more specific connotations. If you tell someone you live in a bungalow, the picture in their mind is not the same as if you tell them that you live in a shanty or in a house.

So when we speak, we need to search for the specific noun (or one of a small set of nouns) for the specific thing we are referring to, while rejecting all of the similar, but not really acceptable, alternatives. For verbs, we can be a lot less precise knowing that the correct gist of the idea will be adequately conveyed.

 

According to current theories and backed by some experimental evidence there are a number of factors involved in word recall difficulty. Two prevalent ones are interference and specificity.

Interference is the idea that words with semantic and/or contextual similarity interfere with each other making recall harder. Specificity is much like @WBahn suggests—but interestingly, at least one research group favors the hypothesis that verbs are more affected by this than nouns.

You can find a fair number of papers on this topic if you want to see the current thinking. It seems less popular to investigate than in the past and a lot of the papers are from the 60s through the 90s.

 

There are at least two words for “saying something by saying you are not saying it”, and I can never think of either of them when I need them.

Looked it up. They are apophasis and paralipsis.

I won’t mention that these are not particularly easy words to remember.

 

We reside in a bungalow by the sea.
We habitate a hovel by the sea.
We occupy an abode by the sea.
We stay in a shanty by the sea.
We lodge in a residence by the sea.
We dwell in a domicile by the sea.

No one would say,
We abode in an abode by the sea.
We occupy a habitat by the sea.

For simplicity, the most common verb that first comes to mind would be live.
As pointed out, the choice of noun conveys a specific style of residence instead of a generic house, e.g. cabin, cottage, hut, hutch, hovel, villa, chalet, cabana, bungalow, shack, shanty.

We live in a small cottage by the sea.

 

Interference is the idea that words with semantic and/or contextual similarity interfere with each other making recall harder. Specificity is much like @WBahn suggests—but interestingly, at least one research group favors the hypothesis that verbs are more affected by this than nouns.

That is one of the problems I have with proper noun recall, the wrong one pops into my head and then blocks the one I'm looking for.

I do have a technique I use to recall names...I start to recite the alphabet and most of the time the name I'm looking for comes to mind when I reach the letter the name starts with...doesn't always work.

 

That is one of the problems I have with proper noun recall, the wrong one pops into my head and then blocks the one I'm looking for.

I am not bilingual but I do have toddler's vocabulary in Tagalog and Spanish. Occasionally I can't think of the English noun because it's being overridden by the equivalent in one of those languages. This also happens to me just with English words, when a close-but-exact noun is too loud in my head. For example I won't be able to think of "branch" because "stick" keeps jumping up and down and waving its arms.

 

I am not bilingual but I do have toddler's vocabulary in Tagalog and Spanish. Occasionally I can't think of the English noun because it's being overridden by the equivalent in one of those languages. This also happens to me just with English words, when a close-but-exact noun is too loud in my head. For example I won't be able to think of "branch" because "stick" keeps jumping up and down and waving its arms.

I believe that that is normal.
My French vocabulary is larger than my Spanish vocabulary. However, oftentimes the Spanish word comes first.
I often say sábado instead of samedi. Or I say escribir instead of écrire.

 

I am not bilingual but I do have toddler's vocabulary in Tagalog and Spanish. Occasionally I can't think of the English noun because it's being overridden by the equivalent in one of those languages. This also happens to me just with English words, when a close-but-exact noun is too loud in my head. For example I won't be able to think of "branch" because "stick" keeps jumping up and down and waving its arms.

This was something that has been interesting to watch in my daughter, who is bilingual (English and Mandarin). When she was three, she acted as the translator between her grandmother and me, and it was fascinating to observe that she never mixed the languages, even though her vocabulary in both was quite limited and there were many words in one language that she didn't know the word in the other. I expected her, at such a young age, to not even really understand that she was speaking two different languages and to, therefore, draw whichever word matched what she was trying to say and mix the two right and left. Instead, if I said something for her to convey to her grandmother, she might turn and start talking (in pure Chinese), and then stop and turn back to me and say something like, "Papa, don't know Chinese for 'garage'", at which point I would either try to come up with a different word, or describe what I was trying to get across. In general, I was extremely impressed by how good a job she did acting as a translator.

 

This was something that has been interesting to watch in my daughter, who is bilingual (English and Mandarin). When she was three, she acted as the translator between her grandmother and me, and it was fascinating to observe that she never mixed the languages, even though her vocabulary in both was quite limited and there were many words in one language that she didn't know the word in the other. I expected her, at such a young age, to not even really understand that she was speaking two different languages and to, therefore, draw whichever word matched what she was trying to say and mix the two right and left. Instead, if I said something for her to convey to her grandmother, she might turn and start talking (in pure Chinese), and then stop and turn back to me and say something like, "Papa, don't know Chinese for 'garage'", at which point I would either try to come up with a different word, or describe what I was trying to get across. In general, I was extremely impressed by how good a job she did acting as a translator.

I would not be at all surprised or upset to find out that your daughter was smarter as a toddler than I am as an adult.