Brown’s Morphological Skills in Children Studying in CBSE and ICSE Curriculum

Abstract

Language is a dynamic, rule governed system of shared symbols that allows individuals to categorize, conceptualize and communicate thought. Language acquisition relies fundamentally on the mastery of morphemes. The acquisition of morphemes serves as the foundational mechanism that elevates a child's language from a fragmented vocabulary to a highly structured grammatically fluent system. The study aims to find the acquisition of morphemes in 8-10 year children studying in CBSE and ICSE curriculum. A group of 30 children further divided into 15 children from CBSE curriculum and 15 children from ICSE curriculum participated in the present study. Tasks given were general conversation, monologue and picture description. The study found that ICSE students acquired a higher number of morphemes at around 8-9 years and full acquisition by 9-10 years whereas CBSE students demonstrate a different rate of development influenced by curriculum specific factors. Among the three tasks both CBSE and ICSE performed better in picture description task, moderate performance for general conversation and poor performance for monologue task. Findings suggest that while educational boards impact the timeline of language development, universal cognitive and task demands shape overall performance patterns.