A Psycholinguistics Analysis on Speech Disorder of a Cerebral Palsic Man in “Door To Door” Film

ABSTRACT

God has created individual as perfect as possible, people are created better than other creature. However, God still gives sufficiency and frailty in every person, because there is no body perfect except God. The characteristics of no perfection also refer to human’s speech system which is categorized as speech or language disorder. Speech or language disorder refers to a language disability which causes the difficulties of understanding and expressing language, such suffered by cerebral palsic man.

Cerebral palsy is one of a number of neurological disorders that appears in infancy or early childhood and permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination. It is one of the diseases caused by the brain damage causing language disorder.

This research uses descriptive qualitative method that emphasizes the specific case—language disorder by using psycholinguistic approaches to analyze the language of a cerebral palsic man taken from true life story of a cerebral palsic man from USA namely Bill Porter who has been successful in his life as door to door salesman. Therefore, the researcher is interested in observing him in order to find out the kind of linguistic disorder produced by him and describe it. She collected the data by observing his utterances in “Door to Door” film.

The results of this study show that Bill Porter’s utterances have some kinds of speech and language disorder namely articulation disorder (from the manner of articulation), phonological disorder (substituting, failure, and omitting sound), voice disorder (improperly, talking too long, and unnatural pitch), and also stuttering (dysfluency and pauses). The result also shows that voice disorder is mostly found and stuttering seldom occurs.

Finally, by analyzing the language of a cerebral palsic man of native speaker, the researcher and the readers are expected to know about the kinds of language disorders. Moreover, this study can lead the next researchers to conduct a research on the native language disorder of women or children with cerebral palsy in the purpose of enriching the understanding of psycholinguistics.