The Syntactic Development of an Indonesian Child in Telegraphic Stage: A Case Study

Abstract

Children in telegraphic stage begin to have syntactic development by filling in the function words, such as articles, preposition, auxiliary verbs and pronouns, and the word ending such as noun and verb ending with-ng to show relation between and among content words. This research used qualitative design with descriptive analysis to describe and investigate how the syntactic development of an Indonesian child in telegraphic stage, the research used a case study in finding syntactic development of Indonesian child in telegraphic stage by doing observation through one participant namely Radeva (a little boy with 2 years old). In this study, the researcher saw that Radeva produced the utterances of non-predicative word (NP) more than predicative word in sentence, it can be accumulated that Radeva used (75%) non-predicative words in his interaction with family and only 25% predicative words which consist of subject and verb in complete sentence, and the syntactic development of Radeva emerged through simulation of environment, child's cognitive and input that the child got from surrounding, Radeva is an Indonesian child who has syntactic development of non-predicative word in sentence more than predicative word and this syntactic development happened naturally through his ability in language utterances.