CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 4,484Language Development and DisordersChild and Animal Learning DevelopmentSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

A First Language: The Early Stages

Brown, Roger·1973·Harvard University Press eBooks
DOI 10.4159/harvard.9780674732469
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children--the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development. These core findings are related to recent work in psychology and linguistics--and especially to studies of the acquisition of languages other than English, including Finnish, German, Korean, and Samoan. Roger Brown has written the most exhaustive and searching analysis yet undertaken of the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they convey. The five stages of linguistic development Brown establishes are measured not by chronological age-since children vary greatly in the speed at which their speech develops--but by mean length of utterance. This volume treats the first two stages. Stage I is the threshold of syntax, when children begin to combine words to make sentences. These sentences, Brown shows, are always limited to the same small set of semantic relations: nomination, recurrence, disappearance, attribution, possession, agency, and a few others. Stage II is concerned with the modulations of basic structural meanings--modulations for number, time, aspect, specificity--through the gradual acquisition of grammatical morphemes such as inflections, prepositions, articles, and case ma…

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.4159/harvard.9780674732469

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The frequency data used by Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001), based on monolingual English parental input reported in Brown (1973), do not accurately reflect input frequency for bilingual children learning English as an L2.

    “Note that, unlike Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001), we excluded the frequency factor from our analyses, as their frequency data were based on monolingual English parental input reported in Brown (1973), which does not accurately reflect the input frequency for bilingual children who are learning English as an L2.”

    From The roles of L1 transfer, L2 exposure, and morphological salience in bilingual children's L2 English morphological development (2025) · cites this paper as Brown (1973)

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Brown, R.
Corresponding author
Brown, Roger
Venue
Harvard University Press eBooks
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Published
1973-12-31
DOI
10.4159/harvard.9780674732469
OpenAlex
W4239427658
Cited by
4,484
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 48 · 2025: 156 · 2024: 94 · 2023: 95 · 2022: 103 · 2021: 161 · 2020: 156 · 2019: 198 · 2018: 159 · 2017: 122 · 2016: 140 · 2015: 152 · 2014: 109 · 2013: 84 · 2012: 103
FWCI
39.94
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Harvard University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Keywords
language acquisition, preschool children, first language development, semantic relations, mean length of utterance, syntax acquisition, grammatical complexity, prepositions, articles, case markers, inflection

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review