Abstract :
The study describes the acquisition of verb by typically developing Amharic-speaking children. It also recruited a cross-sectional research design to gather the speeches’ data from thirty-two children using picture description, spontaneous elicitation, and story-telling tasks. The data were audio-recorded, transcribed using IPA, and analyzed. The result showed that most of Amharic speaking children’s verbs appeared as single utterances. Verbs such as progressive , past and imperfective were predominantly frequent in such a way; especially past and imperfective verbs served being a 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 children’s simple SOV sentences were guided by these verbs. 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 also confirmed 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 were more selective and straightforward to the point. In this regard, older age (4; 5 and 5; 0 years) 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.
Keyword :
Language acquisition, lexical development, acquisition of verbs and order of verb acquisition in Amharic