THE ACQUISITION OF INDONESIAN LEXICAL MORPHEMES BY A CHILD OF THREE-YEARS OLD

The objectives of this qualitative research on the acquisition of Indonesian lexical morphemes of an Indonesian child of three-years old were to (1) to find the types of Indonesian lexical morphemes acquired by a child of three-years old, (2) describe the types of Indonesian lexical morpheme acquired by the child, and (3) measure the level of Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) acquired by the child. In order to collect the data, the research instruments used were tape recorder and written down in a diary during the six times observation. Based on the analyses, there were found 82 nouns, 36 verbs, 25 adjectives, and 24 adverbs with their different numbers of types. Nouns bring the highest position among others lexical morphemes. The result of findings of this study showed that all types of Indonesian lexical morphemes, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were acquired by the child. Universal Grammar is the most dominant ways in acquiring the Indonesian lexical morpehemes. Based on Universal Grammar, she had some morphemes from her innate linguistic knowledge then followed by the imitation, she acquired the morphemes through her well-understanding, and influenced by the reinforcement, the surrounding which forced her to follow the previous utterances. In measuring MLU, she acquired 388 morphemes from 100 utterances and SKA’s MLU was 3.88. In brief it can be concluded that the Indonesian child of three-years old had acquired the types of lexical morphemes. Thus, it is suggested that the child’s language is an interesting study to be conducted, in order to encourage a child to speak and express well at the early childhood. Some suggestions are presented especially to parents, teachers and further researcher for the care of the language acquisition of the children, namely (1) parents should give stimulus of a language such as having conversation, watching movie, telling stories and listening to the music, (2) early childhood teachers need to be creative and adaptive because the children’s needs are different and one must be aware of this, and (3) further research study to find out the more accurate result on Indonesian lexical morphemes and in the average MLU.