Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development

Details: Created: Wednesday, 09 November 2011 08:53; Updated on Thursday, 07 November 2019 17:13

Typical expressive language development

"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 in English usually takes, in terms of morphology and syntax (defined below). They are used extensively by speech-language pathologists /speech and language therapists 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 is done in addition to a structural analysis, and comprises, among other components, a phonetic assessment of the speech sounds a child can produce, and a phonological assessment of the way those sounds are organised into speech patterns.

Morphology

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.

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.

Morpheme

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 is 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 (un-happ-i-est), and THREE MORPHEMES ('un', 'happy', 'est').

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

He	meet	s	the	un	happi	est	boy	s
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

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

The	girl	s	mother	slow	ly	fill	ed	the	bucket	with	water
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12

Stage I Sentence Types

Operations of Reference	Examples	Communicative Intent
Nomination	That car	That is a car.
Recurrence	More juice	There is more juice.
Negation - denial	No wee wee	I did not do a wee wee.
Negation - rejection	No more	I don't want more.
Negation - non-existence	Birdie go	The bird has gone.
Semantic Relations	Examples	Communicative Intent
Action + Agent	Daddy kiss	Daddy is kissing.
Action + Object	Push truck	Pushing the truck.
Agent + Object	Man hat	The man (wears) a hat.
Action + Locative	In bath	I am in the bath.
Entity + Locative	Dolly bed	The dolly is on the bed.
Possessor + Possession (object)	Kim car	Kim's car.
Entity + Attributive	Water hot	The water is hot.
Demonstrative + Entity	This train	THIS train (not THAT train).

Brown's Stage I

Between 12 and 26 months, children are expected to have MLUm's (mean length of utterance measured in morphemes) of about 1.75 morphemes (range 1.0 to 2.0 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, outlined in the table above. The column headed 'communicative intent' includes examples of what the child might have said if they were mature enough to talk in full sentences.

Brown's Stages ("Brown's Morphemes") I to IV

As children's MLUm increases their capacity to learn and use grammatical structures of greater complexity 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	Examples ______________________________
Stage I	12-26	1.75	1.0-2.0	Stage I Sentence Types	see above
Stage II	27-30	2.25	2.00-2.5
1				Present progressive (-ing)	it going
2				in	in box
3				on	on box
4				s-plurals (regular plurals)	my cars
Stage III	31-34	2.75	2.5-3.0
5				Irregular past tense	me fell down
6				's possessive	man's book
7				Uncontractible copula (the full form of the verb to be when it is the only verb in a sentence)	Is it Alison? Yes, it is. Was it Alison? Yes, it was.
Stage IV	35-40	3.5	3.0-3.75
8				Articles	A ball on the book.
9				Regular past tense	She jumped.
10				Third person regular, present tense	The puppy chews it. Jason likes you.
Stage V	41-46+	4.0	3.75-4.5
11				Third person irregular	She does. He has.
12				Uncontractible auxiliary (the full form of the verb 'to be' when it is an auxiliary verb in a sentence)	Are they swimming? Were you hungry? I'm not laughing; she is. She was laughing; not me.
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. Daddy's got tomatoes. My dog's lost his collar.
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. I'm opening it up. We're hiding. It's freezing.

Reference

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Link

Introduction to Language 25 - 36 Months || from Handbook of Language & Literacy Development 0-60 months

Citation

Cite this article as:
Bowen, C. (1998). Brown’s Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development. Retrieved from www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33 on [insert the date that you accessed the file here].