Verbal Communication of Indonesian Language in Students with Intellectual Disabilities at SDLBN 1 Kabupaten Maros Johar Amir 1,* Ratna Sari 2 Nensilianti 3 , Ambo Dalle 4 1,2,3,4 Universitas Negeri Makassar Corresponden author. Email: djohar.amir@unm.ac.id ABSTRACT This qualitative descriptive study critically traces (1) verbal communication features in the Indonesian language of children, or this case, students with intellectual disabilities at SLBDN 1 Kabupaten Maros (State Elementary School for Special Education 1 of Maros Regency); and (2) language function in students with intellectual disabilities at SLBDN 1 Kabupaten Maros when communicating. The subjects were selected from third-grade students at SLBDN 1 Kabupaten Maros with special needs of mild and moderate intellectual disabilities. Data for this study were retrospectively collected from observation, note-taking, interviews, recording and documentation and resulted in the form of (1) a description of verbal communication features in the Indonesian language of the children specified with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities, namely pronunciation and clarity of speech; and (2) a description of language function in the children with intellectual disabilities when communicating which consists of labelling, interaction, and language transmission. Following this, the data source was directly observed from two students with the characteristics of mild and moderate intellectual disabilities. As for the study results, verbal communication features used by a student with mild intellectual disabilities are classified as good, ranging from two to three words where the articulation is clear, both vowels and consonants. While the student with moderate intellectual disabilities can only communicate with one to two words. The clarity of articulation is occasionally unclear where some of the words spoken are lacking letters. Before the function of verbal communication language for both of the students with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities in the function of labelling, they have met the indicators by answering questions, responding to calls, even recognizing people around them. On the part of the interaction function, both the students with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities were able to greet people they met, follow simple conversations, answer calls, but it was found that the student with moderate intellectual disabilities was unable to look at the interlocutor when interacting. The last is the function of language transmission, where the student with mild intellectual disability was able to convey her wishes and feelings, grasp certain words and phrases, but had not been able to remember events and was still difficult to respond to the teaching and learning process. Keywords: verbal communication, language function, children with intellectual disabilities. 1. INTRODUCTION A considerable amount of literature has been published on the language ability of children with intellectual disabilities who have cognitive barriers. Their intelligence development does not reach an optimal stage where verbal and nonverbal stimulation from their environment is difficult for them to transfer properly. Things that seem simple often cannot be comprehended fully. Not to mention their added physiological factors who tend to have difficulty in communicating verbally. This is the cause of the dependence of children with intellectual disabilities on others which is positively high. Because most children with intellectual disabilities cannot use compound sentences, their daily conversations only use alternately single sentences. By and large, when compared to normal children, they Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 622 Proceedings of the International Congress of Indonesian Linguistics Society (KIMLI 2021) Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 92