brown’s stages

Unit 3 Seminar

"Brown's Stages" were identified by Roger Brown 1925-1997 and described in his classic book (Brown,1973). The stages provide a framework within which to understand and predict the path that normal expressive language development usually takes, in terms of morphology and syntax.

They are used extensively by speech-language pathologists when they perform a structural analysis of a sample of a child's spoken language. A structural analysis does not include a measure of a child's development in the area of the clarity of pronunciation of speech sounds.

Such an analysis or assessment is done in addition to a structural analysis, and comprises a phonetic assessment of the speech sounds a child can produce, and a phonological assessment of the way those sounds are organized into speech patterns.

In Linguistics, morphology is the branch of grammar devoted to the study of the structure or forms of words, primarily through the use of the morpheme construct. It is traditionally distinguished from syntax.

In Linguistics, syntax is a traditional term for the study the rules governing the combination of words to form sentences. It is distinguished from morphology, which is the study of word structure.

A morpheme is a unit of meaning. It does not necessarily relate to the "word count" or "syllable count" of an utterance. Here is an example of the way morphemes are counted in the words happy, unhappy, unhappily, and unhappiest, and the sentence 'He meets the unhappiest boys:

happy 'Happy’ is ONE WORD, it has TWO SYLLABLES (ha-ppy), and because it contains only one unit of meaning it counts as ONE MORPHEME.

unhappy If you add another unit of meaning, such as ‘un’, to make 'happy' into ‘unhappy’ you still have ONE WORD, but THREE SYLLABLES (‘un-ha-ppy’) and TWO MORPHEMES (‘un’ and ‘happy’)

unhappily 'Unhappily' is ONE WORD, FOUR SYLLABLES (un-happ-i-ly), and THREE MORPHEMES ('un', 'happy' and 'ly').

unhappiest 'Unhappiest' is also ONE WORD, FOUR SYLLABLES, and THREE MORPHEMES.

"He meets the unhappiest boys" is 1-sentence, it has 5-words, and 8-syllables, and it contains nine morphemes:

"He meets the unhappiest boys" is 1-sentence, it has 5-words, and 8-syllables, and it contains ???? morphemes:

He meet s the un happi est boy s

The answer is 9

"The girl's mother slowly filled the bucket with water" is 1-sentence, it has 9-words, and 13-syllables, and it contains ????morphemes.

The girl s mother slow ly fill ed the bucket with water.

12

Between 15 and 30 months, children are expected to have MLUm's (mean length of utterance measured in morphemes) of about 1.75 morphemes. Their MLUm’s gradually increase as they acquire more language. In Stage I, just after they have built up a 50 to 60 word vocabulary children acquire the ability to produce the Stage I sentence types,

that car That's a car. more juice There is more juice. no wee wee I didn't do a wee wee. no more I don't want more. birdie go The bird has gone.

A child is in the first stage of language development from 12 to 26 months. The

stage opens when the child is producing his first meaningful words, and it closes as

he is beginning to put words together to form simple sentences.

As children's MLUm increases their capacity to learn to use grammatical structures of greater complexity also increases. They move from Stage I into Stage II, where they learn to use "-ing" endings on verbs, "in", "on", and "-s" plurals. They then proceed to Stages III and IV.

Brown's Stage

Age in months

Mean MLUm

MLUm range

Morphological Structure

Stage I 15-30 1.75 1.5-2.0Stage I sentence types

Brown's Stage

Age in months

Mean MLUm

MLUm range


Examples

Stage II 28-36 2.25 2.0-2.5

(1) Present progressive (-ing endings on verbs)

it going, falling off

(2) in in box

(3) on

on tree, birdie on head

(4) -s plurals (regular plurals)

my cars, two ties

Brown's Stage

Age in months

Mean MLUm

MLUm range


Examples

Stage III 36-42 2.75 2.5-3.0(5) Irregular past tense

me fell down

(6) -s possessives

doggie's bone, mommy's hat

(7) Uncontractible copula (the full form of the verb 'to be' when it is the only verb in a sentence

Are they there? Is she coming?

Brown's Stage

Age in months

Mean MLUm

MLUm range


Examples

Stage IV 40-46 3.50 3.0-3.7(8) Articles a book,

the book

(9) Regular past tense (-ed endings on verbs)

she jumped, he laughed

(10) Third person regular present tense

he swims, man brings

Brown's Stage

Age in months

Mean MLUm

MLUm range


Examples

Stage V 42-52+ 4.00 3.7-4.5(11) Third person irregular

she has, he does

(12) Uncontractible auxiliary (the full form of the verb 'to be' when it is an auxiliary verb in a sentence)

Are they swimming?

(13) Contractible copula (the shortened form of the verb 'to be' when it is the only verb in a sentence

She's ready. They're here.

(14) Contractible auxiliary (the shortened form of the verb 'to be' when it is an auxiliary verb in a sentence)

They're coming. He's going.