A psycholinguistic study on expressive language disorder of the autistic child in Mercury Rising film

No body is perfect. Although God has created human being as perfect as possible, moreover people are created better than other creatures. However, God still gives sufficiency and frailty in every person. One of the frailties also refers to human’s speech system which is categorized as language disorder. Language disorder refers to a language disability which causes the damage of understanding and the expression of language, such as autism.

Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. Autism affects many parts of the brain; how this occurs is poorly understood. Children with autism have social impairments and often lack the intuition about others that many people take for granted. Most children with autism do not develop language as early as others, and some never develop language.

This research uses descriptive qualitative method that emphasizes the specific case—language disorder by using psycholinguistic approaches to analyze expressive language disorder of Simon Lynch as an autistic child in Mercury Rising film. Therefore, it is interesting thing observing him in order to find out the kind of expressive language disorder produced by him and describe it. The data are colleted by observing his utterances in Mercury Rising film.

The results of this study show that Simon Lynch’s utterances have some kinds of speech and language disorder namely phonological disorder (substitution, deletion, assimilation, and addition), articulation disorder (from the places of articulation and the manner of articulation), voice disorder (talking too long or too much, and unnatural pitch/intonation, improper stress, grumbling unclear word), and also language disabilities as an autistic child (repetitive and stereotyped utterance, robotic sounding speech, and ritualistic question and answer). The result also shows that voice disorder is mostly found and language disability as an autistic child seldom occurs.

Finally, by analyzing the expressive language disorder of the autistic child of native speaker, it is expected to know about the kinds of language disorders especially expressive language disorder. Moreover, this study can lead the next researchers to conduct a research on the native language disorder of woman or children with autism in the purpose of enriching the understanding of psycholinguistics.