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Determinants of the acquisition order of grammatical morphemes: a re-analysis and re-interpretation

In this paper we are concerned with the issue of children acquiring language, or significant segments thereof, in a relatively consistent and invariant fashion. In particular, we revisit the research of Roger Brown relating to this issue and the more specific question of what the determinants of any such stable acquisition pattern may be. Brown (1973) examined the order of acquisition of 14 grammatical morphemes of English in three children. The morphemes included the present progressive, regular and irregular past tense morphemes, the plural, possessive, and so on. (All the morphemes are listed in Table 1.) Brown's basic finding was that the children did acquire the morphemes in a consistent order, the rank-order correlations between their acquisition orders being between + O-86 and 4-0-88. Brown then went on to consider three possible determinants of acquisition order: first, frequency of the morphemes in parents' speech; second, grammatical complexity (which he also referred to as syntactic complexity); and third, semantic complexity. Since frequency in parents' speech was not significantly related to acquisition order, Brown concentrated his attention on syntactic and semantic complexity. Having made working definitions of these two forms of complexity, he examined their influence on acquisition order. In two separate analyses for the two types of complexity, Brown established that both were significantly related to acquisition order. For syntactic complexity he employed a rank-order correlation and found that the correlation between acquisition order and syntactic complexity was +o-8o (P < o-oi). For semantic complexity a sign test revealed that it, too, was a significant determinant of the order of acquisition (P < o-oi). Brown's overall conclusion is, therefore, that 'the primary determinants of acquisition order will prove to be cumulative