 Browne's Slavic studies began with his undergraduate career at Harvard University (A.B., 1963, in Linguistics and Slavic Languages), and continued with graduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Novi Sad (then in SFR Yugoslavia), culminating in a Ph.D. degree (dated 1980, defended in January 1981, and awarded in 1983) from the University of Zagreb.He studied with some of the finest linguists and Slavicists of the 20th century, including Roman Jakobson, Horace G. Lunt, Morris Halle, and Pavle Ivić.His dissertation, directed by , was entitled "Relativna rečenica u hrvatskom ili srpskom jeziku u poređenju s engleskom situacijom" ("Relative Clauses in the Croatian or Serbian Language in Comparison with the English Situation") and is one of the first serious attempts to analyze Serbo-Croatian syntax within a generative grammar framework.