He was the doctoral adviser or a post-doctoral mentor of many researchers in child language development and psycholinguistics, including Jean Berko Gleason, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Camile Hanlon, Dan Slobin, Ursula Bellugi, Courtney Cazden, Richard F. Cromer, David McNeill, Eric Lenneberg, Colin Fraser, Eleanor Rosch (Heider), Melissa Bowerman, Steven Pinker, Kenji Hakuta, Jill de Villiers, and Peter de Villiers.
[4] Roger Brown's research and teaching focused on social psychology, the relationship between language and thought, and the linguistic development of children.
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.
"[9] 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 analysis of five stages of language development, determined by structures used and by mean length of utterance (MLU),[10] continues to be used in the field today.
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.
[12] 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.
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.
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 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.
Brown and McNeill were able to identify two types of recall: abstract and partial, that participants exhibited when attempting to remember the target words.
[8] He attended Detroit public schools, and began undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, but World War II interrupted his education.
[21] Brown's sexual orientation and his relationship with Gilman were known to a few of his closest friends, and he served on the editorial board of The Journal of Homosexuality from 1985, but he did not come out publicly until 1989.
His obituary in Cognition, written by his friend Steven Pinker, says that Brown's "final years were also marked by declining health.
He was stricken with prostate cancer, epilepsy, arthritis, cellulitis, spinal stenosis (which made it hard for him to walk or stand up straight), and heart disease"; it also says that Brown "planned his suicide to avoid a life of further pain and physical decline.