Which factor best explains the typical order of Brown's morphemes acquisition?

• A. Phonological ease of production
• B. Semantic and syntactic complexity
• C. Pragmatic usefulness
• D. Motor planning demands

Answer: (B)

The key idea is that how a child maps meaning onto grammar shapes the order in which morphemes are learned. Early morphemes provide clear, simple grammatical meaning and fit easily into the basic sentence structures a child is using, so they’re acquired first. As the child’s syntactic system develops, more complex markers that encode tense, agreement, and auxiliary relationships require deeper grammatical knowledge, so these morphemes appear later. This pattern matches Brown’s observations about the sequence of morpheme acquisition, showing that semantic and syntactic complexity—not how easy a sound is to pronounce, how pragmatically useful it seems, or motor demands—best explains the typical order.