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Syntax and morphology items test your knowledge of Brown's 14 grammatical morphemes, sentence-level structures, and typical vs disordered acquisition. Expect 3-5 items.
Praxis syntax items lean heavily on Brown's morphemes and stages because they give ETS an objective developmental yardstick. The order worth memorizing runs present progressive -ing, then the prepositions in and on, then regular plural -s, then irregular past tense, then possessive 's, then the uncontractible copula, then articles, then regular past -ed, then regular third person -s, then irregular third person, then the uncontractible auxiliary, then the contractible copula and contractible auxiliary.
Two facts generate most questions. First, uncontractible forms emerge before contractible forms, so 'He is' as an answer to 'Who is sick?' appears earlier than 'He's sick.' Second, irregular past tense emerges before regular past tense, which is why overregularization ('goed') is a sign of developmental progress rather than regression — the child has extracted the rule and is applying it too broadly.
MLU in morphemes is total morphemes divided by total utterances, calculated on 50 to 100 intelligible utterances. Count each free morpheme and each bound grammatical morpheme separately, but count irregular past forms, catenatives like 'gonna' and 'wanna', diminutives, and compound words as single morphemes. Do not count disfluencies, fillers, or exact self-repetitions.
Interpretation is where items get scored. MLU is a valid index of syntactic growth roughly through Brown's Stage V, about MLU 4.5 and age five; beyond that it plateaus and stops discriminating well, so older students need measures like subordination index, clause density, or a narrative analysis. Answer choices that use MLU to characterize a twelve-year-old's syntax are distractors.
The most reliable clinical marker of DLD in English-speaking preschool and early school-age children is difficulty with tense and agreement morphology: omitted past -ed, omitted third person -s, and omitted copula and auxiliary be. This is the extended optional infinitive pattern, and it separates DLD from typical development more sharply than vocabulary measures do.
The critical caveat, which ETS tests directly, is dialect. In African American English and several other varieties, copula deletion and variable tense marking are rule-governed features of the dialect, not errors. Diagnosing DLD requires evaluating performance against the child's own language variety, using dialect-sensitive tools, language sampling, and dynamic assessment.
Try answering before revealing the rationale — mark misses to retry later.
Q1.Which of Brown's morphemes is typically acquired FIRST?
Correct: C. Present progressive -ing is the first of Brown's 14 grammatical morphemes to be acquired, emerging around 19-28 months.
Q2.A 5-year-old African American child uses habitual 'be' ('she be playing'). This should be identified as:
Correct: B. Habitual 'be' is a rule-governed feature of African American English (AAE), not an error. Assessment must distinguish dialectal features from disorder.
Q3.Which is a derivational morpheme?
Correct: C. -ness is derivational because it changes word class (adjective 'happy' → noun 'happiness'). The other choices are inflectional (grammatical only).
Praxis Path unlocks a full question bank + 132-question timed mock exam and spaced-repetition flashcards.
Are AAE features on the exam?
Yes — recognizing dialectal features as non-disorder is heavily tested and always the correct answer.
Do I need to memorize all 14 morphemes?
Know the first 5 in order cold, and the general early-late progression for the rest.
What is the difference between free and bound morphemes?
Free morphemes stand alone (dog, run). Bound morphemes cannot (-s, -ed, un-).