This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the surface word order of bJI sentences is relatively flexible. In line with these two characteristics of bJI, within the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis (henceforth, SBH) framework (Pinker, 1984, 1989), it is assumed that young bJI-speaking children acquire sentences of the same construction in different forms as one construction from the beginning. On the other hand, within the Usage Based Approach (henceforth, UBA) framework (Tomasello, 2000a, 2000b, 2003), it is assumed that they first acquire sentences of the same construction in different forms as different constructions. To investigate the acquisition of the knowledge of verb argument structure in bJI, the development of the active and passive constructions in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;0 was examined by conducting naturalistic data analyses and comprehension experiments. The naturalistic data analyses were conducted on a corpus of utterances in active and passive voice produced by two bJI-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 3;6. The results support the assumption made by the SBH, as they show that bJI-speaking children already have the tendency to produce sentences in certain forms over sentences in some other forms at the age of two. The results of the comprehension experiments, which were conducted to test the ability of bJI-speaking children between the ages of 2;9 and 4;0 to comprehend actives and passives in various forms, also support the SBH, as they indicate that bJI-speaking children have acquired both the active and passive constructions before the age of three. The results of the various studies conducted in this dissertation also reveal the effect of input frequency as well as input consistency (i.e., the number of the possible interpretations of a construction) on young children's linguistic performance, but not their linguistic competence. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]