A child who correctly uses irregular past tenses such as went or fell would be in which Brown stage?

A child who correctly uses irregular past tenses such as went or fell would be in which Brown stage?

• A. Stage I
• B. Stage II
• C. Stage III
• D. Stage IV

Answer: (C)

In this part of language development, accurately using irregular past tense forms like went or fell shows the child has begun storing and retrieving specific verb forms rather than just applying a general -ed rule. That shift is what Brown identifies at Stage III. At this stage, children move beyond early morphemes and start using irregular past tense with some consistency, marking a key transition in their morpho-syntactic growth. Earlier stages focus on simpler forms and the beginning of past-tense marking, while later stages build on this by expanding auxiliary and article usage and more complex sentence structures. So using went and fell correctly signals Stage III.

In this part of language development, accurately using irregular past tense forms like went or fell shows the child has begun storing and retrieving specific verb forms rather than just applying a general -ed rule. That shift is what Brown identifies at Stage III. At this stage, children move beyond early morphemes and start using irregular past tense with some consistency, marking a key transition in their morpho-syntactic growth. Earlier stages focus on simpler forms and the beginning of past-tense marking, while later stages build on this by expanding auxiliary and article usage and more complex sentence structures. So using went and fell correctly signals Stage III.