VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN AGE 18 – 24 MONTHS

This paper aims at describing the first language acquired by the children in age 18 24 months. This period can be said as at the beginning point when children starting to produce words in their life. The data were taken from a baby 19 months‟ years old, named Elpon, he lives in Trivana Regency, PekanBaru Province. The method is by using diary to note the vocabularies have been acquired.


INTRODUCTION
Language is the systematic and conventional use of sounds (or signs or written symbols) for the purpose of communication or self-expression (Crystal in Hoff, 2005: 2).From this statement, it can be inferred that people use language to communicate or express themselves.Language is needed by the people to convey their ideas, feelings, and thoughts to the other people.
Language itself is the collection of sounds, signs, or symbols.People use them all to make their message understandable.Thus, the language ability is a must.That is why the language is always become the important issue in many researches topics.
The development of language is possibly different from one person to other person.This difference is caused by many aspects, such as psychology and social.These two aspects may have influenced people"s language ability on how the language is acquired and developed, the language impairments phenomena, and how it is accepted in society.
The analysis of how the language is acquired and developed by the people is seen as the most interesting one among the other.This analysis has possibility to contribute our understanding about when do the people get their first sound and word as the smallest part of a language.If we talk about first language, it means that the analysis is started from the beginning of human life; that is childhood.So, in this paper, the focus is the first language acquisition in a child to see how the vocabularies are firstly acquired.Hoff (2005: 3) contends that a child who has acquired language has acquired an incredibly complex and powerful system.This view emphasizes that language is complex and powerful.It strengthens the previous statements about the urgency of language.Hoff then continues that understanding how children accomplish this task will give us something substantial about how the human mind works.The understanding of how the brain works is widely believed to give us opportunity to recognize the brain"s factors causing language disabilities.Therefore, the possible preventions or treatments can be set.
The object in this mini research is the first language acquisition in a child age 19 months named Elpon who currently lives in Pekanbaru, Riau Province.
Diary is used in this research to keep the vocabularies acquired by Elpon.Before explaining the vocabularies acquired by Elpon, this paper will precede the explanation by giving the theory of the vocabulary development in children age 1;5 -2;0 years."It is nothing other than words which has made us human" (Pavlov, 1927(Pavlov, /1960)).
This proverb can give us an amazingly representation of the importance of words among the people.A word is not just any set of sounds (or gestures) that communicates a meaning, it is a symbol.It stands for something without being part of that something, more than arbitrary symbols, the symbols that can be used to refer to things (Hoff,p.140).It means that people uses word to convey the message about things.People need words to talk their feelings, ideas, and concepts.People use the collection of words that are known in the term of language to establish relationships with the other people.
A word contains one unit of meaning.Todd (1995: 49-50) isolates four of the most frequently implied meanings; (1) the orthographic word, which is one which has space on either side of it; (2) a morphological word, which considers form only and not meaning; (3) a lexical word, comprehends the various forms of items which are closely related by meaning, e.g., "take", "takes", "taking", "taken", and "took" are five morphological words but only one lexical word; (4) a semantic word, involves distinguishing between items which may be morphologically identical but differ in meaning, e.g., "table" can refer to a piece of furniture or to a diagram.The diagram and the piece of furniture are the same morphological word but they are two semantic words because they are not closely related in meaning.
The first language learning is divided into two psychological processes; speech production and speech comprehension.People do these two processes in their efforts to master the language.People cannot comprehend and produced speech when they were born.And then, as the time grows and brain develops, those production and comprehension are started to begin.
The development of speech production is started by the people from; (1) vocalization to babbling to speech; (2) early speech stages: naming, holophrastic, telegraphic, and morphemic; (3) later speech stages: rules formation for negatives, questions, relative clauses, passives, and other complex structures.While the speech comprehension is started earlier than the speech production, it is even hs been started from; (1) fetuses and speech input, (2) newborns (neonates) and speech input; (3) normal children speech comprehension develops in advance of speech production; and there is a (4) relative paucity of comprehension studies (Steinberg, et al., 2001: 3 -33).
This paper mainly focuses on the development of the children speech production and how they acquired words or vocabularies to begin their language learning experience, especially in the age of under 2 years.So, to see the development in this period clearly, the phases of speech production development are explained one by one.

Vocalization to Babbling to Speech
According to  infants in around 7 months, children ordinarily begin to babble; to produce what may be described as repeated syllables ("syllabic reduplication"), e.g., "baba", "gigi", "panpan".Most of the basic syllables are Consonant + Vowel type; some consist of closed syllables of the simple Consonant + Vowel + Consonant variety.Vocalizations take on the character of speech.Infants from different language communities begin to babble somewhat distinctively, using some of the intonation of the language to which they have been exposed.The production of sounds using the intonation countours of the first language is obviously a learned phenomenon because when infants babble they follow the intonation countours of the language they hear.There is some discontinuity between babbling and meaningful speech where the kinds of sounds which occur in babbling are not always immediately realized in meaningful speech.In vocalization, children produce /k/, /g/, and /l/, and speech will come after the children vocalize and babble /p/, /t/, /m/, /a/, and /o/.

Early Speech Stages: Naming, Holophrastic, Telegraphic, and Morphemic
Children can be said to have learned their first word when (1) they are able to utter a recognizable speech form, and when this is done (2) in conjunction with some object or event in the environment.The naming of objects is one of the first uses to which children put words.Holophrastic is the use of single words to express complex thoughts which involve those objects, e.g., a child may point to a hat and say "mama" means "The hat belongs to mama".The next stage is telegraphic, the period when children produce two or three word utterances.

Request (Agent) -Action -Receiver -Object
The last stage is morphemic acquisition in which the two and three word utterances by the children are elaborated.They start to add function words and inflection to their utterances.Function words like the prepositions "in" and "on", the articles "the", "a", and "an", the modals "can", and "will", and the auxiliaries "do", "be" and "have", begin to appear, together with inflections such as the plural /s/ on "cats", and /z/ on "dogs", and tense markings such as the /t/ past tense form on "worked".

METHODS
The object in this mini research is the first language acquisition in a child age 19 months named Elpon who currently lives in Pekanbaru, Riau Province.
The data of this research collected through Qualitative data.The researcher collected the data through observation .The observation data was taken by diary is used in this research to keep the vocabularies acquired by Elpon.Before explaining the vocabularies acquired by Elpon, this paper will precede the explanation by giving the theory of the vocabulary development in children age 1;5 -2;0 years.

FINDING AND DISCUSSION
Elpon is a 19 months child.Elpon gets Bahasa Indonesia from her mother in daily activities instead of local language that is Ocu .Most of people at Elpon"s closest environment speak Ocu.However, Elpon shows a significant ability to grasp both of the words in these two languages.It can be seen from the total vocabularies got until she is 19 months right now, most of the words are Indonesian language, and some are Ocu.
All of the words are got from Elpon"s daily activities in having the contacts and experience by the other people.Besides that, the language exposures are always given to her by her mother.Hoff adds that "…the children"s first words reflect their experiences.They know people, food, body parts, clothing, animals, and household items that are involved in children daily routines.Routines are also the source of early expression…" To see the complete vocabularies can be seen in the following table..mpat, imma, enam, ujuh, apan, iyan, uyuh hoyeee… /tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh, horee/ (…three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, horayy!) From the conversations, it can be seen that in this age Elpon has acquired not only words, but also tried to compose the simple sentences.Different children may have different characteristic and ability in acquiring the language.This data can be useful for the parents in doing their parentheses duty to guide and monitor their children language development.

CONCLUSION
The understanding of this speech production may have beneficial contribution for the parents to decide and consider the kind of language learning and exposures to be given to the children.Parents are also able to simply monitor whether their children grow faster or lower than the normal children development.