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                  Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
                               The New York Times

               December 18, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final

   Roger Brown, who turned the attention of many psychologists to the
question of how children learn language and who wrote two classic
psychology textbooks, died on Dec. 11 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He
was 72.

   Dr. Brown had been suffering from prostate cancer and coronary artery
disease, according to the psychology department at Harvard University, from
which he retired as a professor emeritus two years ago.

    Dr. Brown, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in the
late 1960's founded the modern field of developmental psycholinguistics. He
was also a leader in social psychology, the study of how people relate to
the world.

   Several of his colleagues described him as a scholar who had no academic
rivals or enemies because he was never arrogant. "Roger was gentle and had
enormous humility," said Dr. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard colleague. "He won all
those prizes but it never rubbed off, and therefore he had extraordinary
moral authority."

   Dr. Brown's first major achievement was to explore how languages are
limited by the nature of human thought and that, conversely, the structure
of any given language influences the thinking of those who speak it. It is
a topic hotly debated by modern philosophers, and Dr. Brown made major
contributions with a book titled "Words and Things" (Free Press, 1958).

   "Roger looked deeply into the logic of things," said Dr. Philip Holzman,
a colleague in psychology. "He asked simple questions -- what is this all
about? -- and gave elegant lectures that never dumbed down the ideas."

   In 1965, Dr. Brown wrote his first textbook, "Social Psychology" (Free
Press), which became a classic in the field. He saw the importance of the
way people perceive their world, said Dr. Jerome Bruner, a research
professor of psychology at New York University.

   "If you really want to understand how people react to the world, you
need to know how they see it, how they render it for themselves," Dr.
Bruner said. "He was interested in how people build stories of events in
the world and live accordingly."

   In 1986, Dr. Brown wrote "the first forthright treatment of
homosexuality in all of psychology," Dr. Holzman said, in a discussion of
sex differences in his second edition of "Social Psychology." He also wrote
an introductory textbook called "Psychology" (Little Brown, 1974) with Dr.
Richard Herrnstein, that has a reputation for being so conceptually
difficult that professors use it for preparing lecture notes and assign
easier books to their students.

   In the late 1960's, Dr. Brown began a landmark study of how infants
learn language, focusing on three children he called Adam, Eve and Sarah.
It was the first time anyone had taken the trouble to write down every
utterance of babies and toddlers as they learned to talk, said Dr. Gregg
Solomon, a lecturer in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who was a student of Dr. Brown.

   The body of Dr. Brown's work is "still being mined by researchers," Dr.
Solomon said.

   In his book "A First Language," (The Harvard Press, 1973), Dr. Brown
described how children proceed through different levels of language
competence as they learn to understand sounds. After a stage of uttering
one word at a time, they proceed to saying two words at a time. Then, Dr.
Brown said, "all hell breaks loose."

   In fact, the explosion of language complexity is so great that Dr. Brown
abandoned all hope of writing a second volume on the later stages of how
children learn language, though his frameworks for studying language in
babies are still being used worldwide.

   "Roger had a knack for picking interesting topics," Dr. Kagan said.  For
example, he studied the way people have words "on the tip of the tongue"
but cannot retrieve them and so-called flashbulb memories: recollections of
what a person was doing at the moment when the news arrived that President
John F. Kennedy had been shot or the space shuttle had exploded. In recent
years, Dr. Brown was absorbed in a study of politeness: how people speak,
depending on whom they are addressing.

   In 1996, Dr. Brown published his autobiography, "Against My Better
Judgment" (Haworth Press), which describes his homosexuality.

   "He had a strong need to write about his experiences," Dr. Kagan said.
"He hoped it would help people understand about human loneliness and what
homosexuals have to go through."

   Other colleagues described the book as "raw" and "very, very honest."
Dr. Brown's partner of 40 years, Albert Gilman, an expert on Shakespeare at
Boston University, died a few years ago.

   Both were devoted to opera. "I think Roger saw his own life in terms of
tragic, operatic themes, as kind of theater in itself," Dr. Bruner said.

   Roger Brown was born in Detroit and attended the University of Michigan,
where he received his bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. in psychology. He
taught at Harvard after World War II, and in 1957, he moved to M.I.T.,
where he rose to the rank of full professor. He returned to Harvard in 1962
and became the John Lindsley Professor in Memory of William James.

   He held high offices in the American Psychological Association and won
many awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the
psychological association.

   He is survived by his brothers, Don and Douglas.

GRAPHIC: Photo: Roger Brown