 He was the doctoral adviser or a post-doctoral mentor of many researchers in child language development and psycholinguistics, including Jean Berko Gleason, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Camile Hanlon, Dan Slobin, Ursula Bellugi, Courtney Cazden, Richard F. Cromer, David McNeill, Eric Lenneberg, Colin Fraser, Eleanor Rosch (Heider), Melissa Bowerman, Steven Pinker, Kenji Hakuta, Jill de Villiers, and Peter de Villiers.A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Brown as the 34th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.Brown earned an undergraduate psychology degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Michigan.