Chart - Brown's Stages of Language Development

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.