Sound Changes in Indonesian Children’s First Language Acquisition: A Pragmatic Interpretation of Early Phonological Development

From a pragmatic approach, this study examines the presence and absence of consonant sounds in the early speech of Indonesian children. Descriptive data were collected from four Indonesian children aged one to two years through naturalistic observation and audio recordings. The children's utterances were transcribed and analyzed using phonological process classification and interpreted through a pragmatic framework. In the context of communicative intent and pragmatic background, this study seeks to identify and clarify phonological consonant processes, including initial and final consonant deletion, velar fronting, and cluster reduction. This study examines phonological development and interprets the findings through a pragmatic perspective. The results show that sound omission and substitution are not arbitrary articulation errors, but rather strategic adaptations by children to achieve effective communication. Although medial positions show higher accuracy, sound loss is most common at the initial and final locations. The way children create and refine sounds is significantly influenced by pragmatic interactions such as input from caregivers, mimicry, and contextual cues. Using Halliday's functional theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle, and Tomasello's usage-based model, the present findings indicate that pragmatic intent may play an important role in shaping children's early phonological production. Therefore, early sound acquisition is best understood as a pragmatics achievement, the result of children's efforts to express meaning efficiently in social interactions, rather than merely a physiological mechanism for articulation.