Roger Brown
A child’s language reveals how thought is built.
American social psychologist and psycholinguist known for work on language development, memory and social language.
Language development reveals how children build thought, grammar and social meaning.
Who they were
Roger Brown watched children assemble language piece by piece, and found order in it — a steady sequence in which grammar emerges. He also studied the tip-of-the-tongue state and how words like "you" carry social distance, showing that language maps both the growing mind and our relationships.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Best known as a theorist — their ideas shaped the techniques of those who followed.
Their big idea
Language Development
Roger Brown charted how children acquire grammar in a regular sequence, introducing measures like mean length of utterance and showing that early speech is telegraphic — meaning-rich but stripped of grammatical markers.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Brown — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.