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.