---
title: "The developmental realization of ejectives — Alamirew 2021"
description: "This study examines how Amharic-speaking children aged 3;0 to 5;0 produce ejective consonants, a sound class common in Ethiopian languages whose…"
authors: ["Fikre  Diress Alamirew", "Abebayehu Messele  Mekonnen"]
year: 2021
venue: "Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development"
source: "https://science-res.com/index.php/jclad/article/view/49"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alamirew-2021-developmental-realization-ejectives-typically-developing/"
---
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# The developmental realization of ejectives by typically developing Amharic speaking children

**Authors:** [Fikre  Diress Alamirew](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/fikre-diress-alamirew/), Abebayehu Messele  Mekonnen · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7974874) · [PDF](https://science-res.com/index.php/jclad/article/download/49/99) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4226398503)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This study examines how Amharic-speaking children aged 3;0 to 5;0 produce ejective consonants, a sound class common in Ethiopian languages whose acquisition has received little research attention. The authors used a cross-sectional design with 32 typically developing children. They recorded speech from three kinds of tasks: naming single words, repeating sentences and producing spontaneous speech. The recordings were transcribed in IPA and ExtIPA, and deviations were tabulated by sound, process and position in the word. Most children produced /p'/, /t'/, /k'/, /tʃ'/ and /s'/ correctly when the sound stood alone, but ejectives inside consonant clusters were often dropped. Some children replaced ejectives with their plain pulmonic equivalents, a pattern also reported for Sidamuu Afoo. Three older children produced unusual substitutions, and the authors leave open whether these signal delay. Overall, most children appear to master ejectives before age four, though full mastery can extend past five. The findings supply early baseline data for Amharic phonology and for spotting possible speech delay.

## Key points
- The sample was 32 typically developing Amharic-speaking children aged 3;0–5;0, recorded cross-sectionally through single-word, sentence-repetition and spontaneous elicitation tasks, then transcribed with IPA and ExtIPA.
- The ejectives studied were /p'/, /t'/, /k'/, /tʃ'/ and /s'/. Errors were charted separately for word-initial (WI), word-medial (WM) and word-final (WF) positions.
- The most common non-target process was de-ejectivisation, where the ejective is replaced by its pulmonic counterpart. One example is /k'əj/ 'red' produced as [kəj].
- Three children aged 3;10 to 5;0 showed rare substitutions: /t'/→[tʰ], /tʃ'/→[tʰ] or [t'], and /s'/→[tʃ']. Words containing /s'/ appeared in the speech of only ten children, so conclusions about that sound are limited.
- The authors observed that children who started preschool earlier produced consonants more accurately. They suggest that exposure and oral practice at home and school support acquisition.

## Interesting ideas
- The authors label each error with a named process (such as de-ejectivisation) and a word position, rather than just counting mistakes, which shows where errors cluster and why. — For Mova (learn): Parser and tagger errors could be grouped by error type and sentence position, so that self-induced repair rules target recurring systematic patterns instead of individual mistakes.
- The study separates errors that drop just one feature (ejective becomes plain) from rare cross-category swaps, treating the first as normal development and the second as a possible warning sign. — For Mova (tree): During UD dialect conversion or parser evaluation, near-miss label confusions could be distinguished from structurally distant ones, with only the distant ones flagged for review.
- The same sounds are elicited in isolation, in repeated sentences and in free speech, which reveals how difficulty depends on context. — For Mova (answer): School-test and fable QA could probe the same skill with an isolated item, a templated sentence and free text, to show whether a failure comes from the knowledge itself or from the context.
- Accuracy is high for single consonants but drops in clusters, showing that local context strongly affects performance. — For Mova (tokens): Morphology and lemma accuracy could be reported separately for simple forms and for clitic or compound environments, so that weak spots stay visible behind the averages.
- Patterns from a related language (Sidamuu Afoo) serve as a reference point for judging whether an observed pattern is ordinary or unusual. — For Mova (learn): Witness-parser disagreements could be compared against a baseline of known typical disagreement patterns, with only the unexpected ones escalated to the LLM teacher tiers.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{alamirew2021developmental,
  title = {{The developmental realization of ejectives by typically developing Amharic speaking children}},
  author = {Alamirew, Fikre  Diress and Mekonnen, Abebayehu Messele},
  journal = {Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.7974874},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7974874}
}
```

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