Roger Brown's research and teaching focused on social psychology, the relationship between language and thought, and the linguistic development of children. The clarity, directness, and humor of his scholarly writing are often praised; Pinker describes him as "perhaps the best writer in psychology since James himself". Brown's book
Words and Things: An Introduction to Language (1957) examines the mutual influence of thought and language, described as "the first book on the psychology of language coming out of the cognitive revolution". His writing in this area became an inspiration for much work in the relation between language and cognition, including Eleanor Rosch (Heider)'s work on color names and color memory and Steven Pinker's 1994 book
The Language Instinct. Brown taught social psychology and published his first textbook,
Social Psychology, in 1965. The book was completely rewritten and published in 1986 as
Social Psychology: The Second Edition. Brown also wrote an introductory textbook on psychology, co-authored with his colleague
Richard Herrnstein. Pinker noted that these two books "live in publishing infamy as a lesson of what happens to textbooks that are unconventional, sophisticated, and thought-provoking: they don't sell." In the late 1950s, Brown and then his student Jean Berko Gleason undertook the first experimental studies on
children's language development. During the late 1960s, Brown and several junior colleagues, including Ursula Bellugi, Colin Fraser, and Richard F. Cromer, undertook a landmark study of the linguistic development of children, published in
A First Language: The Early Stages. This book chronicled the language development of three English-speaking children over several years, and provided an in-depth analysis of the early stages of first language acquisition. This analysis of five stages of language development, determined by structures used and by mean length of utterance (MLU), continues to be used in the field today. The original transcriptions of the three children's conversations, along with materials from many other children speaking a wide variety of languages, is available from the
Child Language Data Exchange, founded by Brian MacWhinney (
Carnegie Mellon University) and Catherine Snow (Harvard). Other important works by Brown include his 1976 paper on "
Flashbulb Memories", concerning people's memories of what they were doing at the time they heard about major traumatic events such as the JFK assassination. The breadth of his interests is seen in the papers reprinted in his 1970 book
Psycholinguistics, which includes work with David McNeill on the '
tip of the tongue state', a study with Albert Gilman of the social factors involved in choosing familiar versus polite second-person pronouns (
tu, vous) in languages like French and Spanish, and a review of the novel
Lolita by Harvard colleague
Vladimir Nabokov. Brown was known for the grace with which he treated and referred to his colleagues, whether junior or senior.
Linguistic Determinism and the Part of Speech (1957) In 1957, Brown sought to figure out how language constitutes perception and thought of one's surroundings. Specifically, he took a critical look at how the meanings we assign to parts of speech (e.g., verbs naming actions and nouns naming substances) constitute differences in cognition among people. Brown focused on the semantic definition of a noun, which is known as a person, place or thing. The problem that he identified is that there is no definitive meaning of what a thing is, hence, Brown explained that nouns may be the key to understanding how parts of speech affect cognition. He hypothesized that nouns “tend to have” semantic characteristics contrary to verbs and that speakers pick up these semantic inconsistencies when learning English. To test the hypothesis, an evaluation of nouns and verbs used by children learning English and English speaking adults was completed to identify whether or not the nouns and verbs used had clear semantic differences. The examination showed that child use of nouns and verbs had clear semantic distinctions as opposed to adults. With this result, Brown also questioned if children were conscious of their distinct semantics. This question was answered through a test. An image association experiment performed on children showed that they use the part of speech of a word (whether a word is a noun, adjective, etc.) as a hint to the word's definition. In essence, children are in fact aware of semantic implications while engaging in parts of speech. Brown concluded that semantic distinctions of the parts of speech affect cognition and that different languages and their respective parts of speech may be determinants of varying cognitive operations for those who use said languages.
The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity (1960) In 1960, Brown and Albert Gilman conducted a questionnaire in order to gain a deeper understanding of the pronoun “you” across five languages. These five languages studied include Italian, German, Spanish, English, and French. The questionnaire presents participants with a scenario in which they must select the appropriate pronoun when speaking to others belonging to different social class, familiarities and ages. The results indicate participants shift between different pronouns in order to best compliment those they are speaking to. Brown and Gilman theorized that there are two different styles of “you,” one to indicate a power dynamic, and the other to indicate a solidarity dynamic. They termed the pronoun of solidarity “T”, and the pronoun of power “V” to make for clarity and understanding. The varied use of T and V is used to implicate different relationships between those in conversation based on factors such as age, social class, similarity, familiarity, respect, and expression of mood.
The Tip of The Tongue Phenomenon (1966) To test the
Tip of the Tongue phenomenon empirically, Brown and David McNeill conducted a study in which they asked participants to look over a list of words and definitions and then listen to the definition one of the words on the list. Those in the “tip of the tongue” state were asked to fill out a chart assessing the related words that they are able to come up with. Brown and McNeill were able to identify two types of recall: abstract and partial, that participants exhibited when attempting to remember the target words. Abstract recall relies on the number of syllables in the target word or the location of stressed syllables in the word while partial recall relies on the number of letters the target word. ==Awards==