A Psycholinguistic Analysis on comprehension disorder of the Schizophrenic character in “The Soloist” movie

ABSTRACT

Comprehension disorder is a language disability which causes impairment of both the understanding and the expression of language. Schizophrenia is chronic, severe, and debilitating mental illness. Schizophrenia is characterized by profound disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self.

The study is aimed to get the understanding and detailed explanation about comprehension disorder used by the schizophrenic character of “The Soloist” movie. This research will give understanding about the schizophrenia characteristic, types of comprehension disorder, and the content causing used in comprehension disorder through movie dialogue.

This research use descriptive qualitative which describes about language disorder and attempts to explore the application of sentence form as language disorder on language comprehension in schizophrenic utterances which are spoken by Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the main character who has schizophrenia in The Soloist movie.

This study used Ginsberg’s theory. He distinguishes comprehension disorder into twelve types. This study shows that Nathaniel Anthony Ayers used eight types of language comprehension disorder of schizophrenic character in the Soloist movie. They are derailment, pressure of speech, perseveration, retardation, blocking, flight of ideas, circumstantiality, and irrelevant answer. Four kinds of comprehension disorder were not found; they are word salad, incoherence, neologism, and clang association. Besides, it is found tree contexts causing the comprehension disorder of schizophrenic character in the Soloist movie. Those are delusion, hallucination, and disorganized speech.

The researcher hopes that this research can give a new contribution to the readers, especially the students who are interested in psycholinguistics which is related to schizophrenia. It means that the student can learn about schizophrenia, which has been so familiar nowadays. Besides, it will give more view to the lecturer of psycholinguistic field about language comprehension disorder in schizophrenia sufferer. Besides, this research is expected to give more information to the nurse and doctors who maintain the sufferer in order to understand about the language of schizophrenia sufferer.