preview

Analysis Of ' Roger Brown ' Essay

Better Essays

In 1973, Roger Brown performed an in-depth study of three children and proposed stages that children naturally go through in regards to language acquisition. Although he examined semantics and grammar as well, the part concerning the order of morpheme acquisition is of the most interest to this paper. Brown proposed that morpheme acquisition follows a fairly regular process or order. He came to this conclusion after performing an in-depth analysis of the morpheme acquisition of his three test subjects. This paper makes use of Brown’s (1973) proposed order of morpheme acquisition when testing the participants’ morphological development. Carol Chomsky studied the syntactic acquisition of children ages 5-10 in 1969. In order to do this, she created a series of experiments that involved different complex syntactic structures to test approximately when children have mastered certain syntactic structures. Her book, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10 (1969) focuses on 4 experiments: (1) the Easy to see experiment, (2) the Promise experiment, (3) the Ask/tell experiment, and the Pronominalization experiment. This paper focuses on the first experiment, conducting Carol Chomsky’s original experiment as well as a variant on both of the participant. Introduction This research paper examines the morphosyntactic differences exhibited between a 4 ½ year old and a 6 year old. These differences include Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), acquisition of Brown’s 14

Get Access