Investigation of Acquisition of Oromo Inflectional Morphology in Typically Developing Children

This research is aimed at investigating patterns of acquisition of Oromo inflectional morphology in typically developing children. The study specifically tries to look into he acquisition of some verbal inflections (tense and aspect) and nominal inflections (number and case). Although linguistic descriptions on various aspects of the Oromo language have extensively been done, there were no research available on the child language acquisition in Oromo in general and inflectional morphology acquisition in particular. The study employed a descriptive cross-sectional research design. Data were collected from thirty children age range 3;0-7;11 years. The study employed primarily elicited production through picture naming method. The speech samples were transcribed first Oromo script and then phonetically transcribed using the IPA symbols. The results showed that some morphological processes attested in children’s productions. In this process, the children employed substitution, and overextension strategy in naming the pictures. In addition, majority of the children omitted noun inflectional morphemes, even at the age 6 through 7. Furthermore, the omission of some inflectional morphemes on the locative case and progressive aspect morpheme were observed, but the lexical morphemes are retained for the latter two items. As to the two past and future tenses, almost all participants performed well. This implies the children acquired these tenses even before the age of 3;3. Evaluating the children’s performance based on sex at the same age, the study revealed an insignificant difference among both sexes.