Mental integration skills are the only thing that you need to be exposed to words with recursive structure in your early childhood, roughly until the age of 5, or you will not be able to learn this as an adult.
The same is true for deaf children in developing countries where social support is lacking and where they have not been exposed to sign language with a recursive structure. These children may later receive hearing aids and thorough speech therapy, but they are still unable to complete simple instructions such as “put the green box in the blue box.
Characteristic of these children is the following behavior. The children lifted the green and blue boxes correctly and repeated the trial-and-error process of moving the two boxes in space “while looking at the experimenter’s face” to get a clue as to whether they were correct or not. https://wired.jp/2019/09/01/recursive-language-and-imagination/
So you understand “green box” and “blue box,” but have difficulty with ”~ to ~.”
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