Roger W. Brown, a retired Harvard professor who made significant advances in the development of language skills and wrote two classic psychology textbooks, died at his home in Cambridge on Dec. 11. He was 72.

"He was a wonderful colleague and a creative psychologist who made seminal contributions in the field of language development," said Starch Professor of Psychology Jerome Kagan.

Kagan said he assigns some of Brown's writings for this Core class Social Analysis 56: "Children and their Social Worlds," which he teaches with Professor of Law Martha L. Minow in the spring.

One of Brown's important studies described what Brown termed "flash-bulb memory--the phenomenon by which during emotional situations a person may remember otherwise insignificant details.

"You remember where you were, what you were doing, what was on your desk,"

Kagan said. Brown described this phenomenon is a study done about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy '40, Kagan said.

Brown also studies "tip-of-the-tongue" situations, when subjects cannot quite remember the word for which they were searching.

Brown found that if the subjects are encouraged to guess a word, they give words with the same stresses and syllables as the word they cannot remember. Brown used this study to suggest that language is stored more by its rhythmic qualities than its syntax or meaning.

"He was a very gifted scholar and a wonderful human bring," Kagan said. Though retired, Brown occasionally came to departmental meetings and offered advice when needed, Kagan said.

"He was a very rare, Renaissance scholar," he said. "It will be a long time before we have another as gifted, erudite and humane scholar."

Brown taught at Harvard following World War II and then accepted a full professorship at MIT in 1957. He returned to Harvard in 1962 and become the John Lindsley professor of psychology. He retired in 1995.

"Roger Brown was a model scholar, a writer virutally without peer in the discipline and a wonderful teacher and mentor," said Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter. "The Department of Psychology will miss him deeply, as will the entire field to which he made such profound contributions."

Brown was the author of the textbooks Social Psychology (1965) and A First Language (1973). Many of his contributions to the question of how and why language is structured can be found in Words and Things (1958) Brown published an autobiography, Against My Better Judgment,in 1996, which dealt with his homosexuality.

"He had a strong need to write about his experience," Kagan told The New York Times. "He hoped it would help people understand about human loneliness and what homosexuals have to go through."

Brown is survived by two brothers, Don and Douglas