Psycholinguistic analysis on the utterances produced by an autistic character in “Rain Man” movie

Although God has created human being as perfect as possible, but nobody is perpect. One of the frailties refers to human’s speech system which is categorized as language disorder. Language disorder refers to language disability which causes the damage of understanding and the expression of language such as in autistic language. Therefore, this study describes the language disorder produced by an autistic character in “Rain Man” movie. Generally, the societies think that autistic syndrome just happens in childhood, but this movie tells us about the speech of an adult with autism.

This study uses descriptive qualitative method that emphasizes on the specific case—language disorder by using psycholinguistic approaches to analyze the utterances of language disorder by Raymond Babbitt, an autistic character. Therefore, it is interesting to observe this character in order to find out the kind of language disorder produced. The data are in words, phrases, and sentences which are collected by observing his utterances in “Rain Man” movie.

The result of this study shows that the autistic character has some kinds of speech and language disorder namely articulation disorder (from the places and manners of articulation), phonological disorder (addition, assimilation, deletions and substitution), voice disorder (talking too much, unnatural pitch or intonation, improper stress, and grumbling unclear words or sentences), and also repetition (repetitive and stereotyped utterance, ritualistic question and answer, and robotic sounding speech). The result also shows that phonological disorder is mostly found and stuttering seldom occurs.

Finally, by analyzing the language disorder of the autistic character, it is expected that the language therapist know about the kinds of language disorder to handle autism. Moreover, it is suggested that the next researchers conduct similar theme of the study but have more complete data and discussion.