The Acquisition of Verbs by Amharic Speaking Children

Abstract

The study describes the acquisition of verb by typically developing Amharic-speaking children. It recruitedcross-sectional research design to gather the speeches’ data from thirty-two children using picture description, spontaneous elicitation, and story-tellingtasks. Thedata were audio- recorded, transcribed using IPA, and analyzed. The result showed that most ofAmharic speakingchildren’s verbs appeared as single utterances. Verbs such as progressive, pastand imperfective were predominantly frequent in such a way; especially past and imperfective verbs appeared potentially meaningful simple sentence without overt subject and object.Similarly, auxiliary verbs, as a linking or helping verb, they had a consistent occurrence and most of the childrensimple SOVsentences were guided by auxiliaries. Moreover, the perfective, imperatives, and gerund verbs had a significant representation. However, passives were the least and they were not even detected in some children’s speeches. The result alsoconfirmed, that progressive, past and auxiliary verbs had a leading place followed by imperfective. Children also varied in their choice of verbs while describing things, expressing ideas, and narrating events. Some children used a certain verbs monotonously but others weremore selective andstraightforward to the point. In this regard, olderage (4;5and 5;0years) girls had better performance. The distribution of verbs, in type and frequency also portrayed that how some verbs more salient than others. In sum, the progressive and past verbs were likely acquired earlier than others. However, verbs like passives seemingly need time. This implies that the order of verb acquisition differs cross linguistically due to the nature of derivational and inflectional morphology that children are able to acquire first.