Arnawa, Nengah (2009). Bahasa Bali usia anak-anak: Kajian Metabahasa Semantik Alami [Children’s Balinese: A Natural Semantic Metalanguage study]. Linguistika, 16(30). PDF (open access)
This study seeks to test the hypothesis that children acquire the exponents of universal semantic primes sooner than they do other semantic material. The children observed were Balinese 4-6 year olds. The Balinese exponents of the NSM primes belong to the so-called neutral style or kepara, a vocabulary style that is unmarked and generic.
It was found that the 4-6 year olds are able to produce 58 out of the sixty exponents in their utterances. The exponents not produced by the Balinese children in our sample are AKLINYENGAN ‘MOMENT’ and MIRIB ‘MAYBE’. The absence of the semantic prime AKLINYENGAN is due to the uncertainty of the lexical reference; similarly, MIRIB ‘MAYBE’ is absent because of cognitive limitations: children are not able to use the knowledge they have to predict what is going to happen.
The exponents that have the widest distribution in Balinese are ICANG ‘I’ and BENA ‘YOU’. However, the children in our sample were not able to construct sentences using ICANG ‘I’ and BENA ‘YOU’ as psychological objects.
This paper is about language acquisition. It does not contain any explications or scripts. No rating is provided.
