THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYNTAX OF THE CHILDREN 20-48 MONHTS

The objectives of the study were to find out: (1) the syntactic category that children acquire at 20-48 (2) the Development of the syntax of the children 20-48 months. The study was descriptive qualitative. The subjects of the study were 28 children in child care center Sampali Medan . The data of the study were the transcription of children’s utterences to the parents or care taker recorded from the conversations in daily activity. The data were identified, analyzed, and categorized based on Miles and Huberman’s theory. The findings of the study showed that: (1) Among the five categories of phrases, two of them have been acquired by the children of 20-48 months, namely verb phrase and noun, and for Sentence pattern, S+V+C is the highest level of acquisition, then followed by S+V and S+V+O, and the last is S+V+O+C .While based on the function of sentence, two of the sentence function have been acquired by the children of 20-48 months and (2)The development of syntax is (a) among the two phrases the verb phrase is earliest for the child to acquire as early as the age of 20 months, while the noun phrase is the second one as early as the age of 28 months (b) All of the patterns of sentence have been acquired by the children of 20-48 months (c) the earliest function the child acquired is the declarative function as early as the age of 26, the second is the imperative as early as the age of 40.