Order Morpheme Example

1 Present Progressive I driving

2-3 Prepositions in, on

4 Plural balls

5 Irregular Past Tense broke, fell

6 Possessive Daddy's chair

7 Uncontractible Copula This is hot

8 Articles a, the

9 Regular past tense She walked

10 3^rd person present tense, regular He works

11 3^rd preson present tense, irregular She does

12 Uncontractible auxilliary Ross is winning

13 Contractible copula He's a clown

14 Contractible auxiliary She's drinking

• Brown discovered that the order of morpheme acquisition did not depend on frequency of exposure (in parental speech).

• Instead, Brown concluded that the morphemes were required in order of syntactic and semantic complexity.