A Psycholinguistic study on the language produced by an Autistic character in Dear John movie

ABSTRACT

Language production is a process how language going on from thinking to felling orally, in the form of word and sentence. In the world, God has created human being as perfect as possible, but nobody is perfect. 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 “Dear John” movie. Generally, the societies think that autistic syndrome just happens in childhood, but this movie tells us about the utterance of an old person with autism.

This study is aimed to find out how the autistic character produces the language. Therefore, this study focuses on seeking the kind of expressive language disorder occurs in the conversation when the autistic character produces the language in Dear John movie and also the context in which the autistic character has difficulty to produce his utterance.

This study uses descriptive qualitative method that emphasizes on the specific case of language disorder by using psycholinguistic approaches to analyze the utterances of language disorder by Mr. Tyree, 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 Dear John movie.

The result of this study shows that the autistic character has some kinds of errors when he is producing his sentence namely phonological disorder and syntactical disorder. The most interesting finding is that the phonological disorder is combined with syntactic and pragmatic disorders. The result also shows that phonological disorder is mostly found in this study. The kind of phonological disorder is on suprasegmental phonology or prosodic.

By the conclusion of this study, people in general are suggested to be aware of the characteristics of language disorder, especially for those making contact with autistic person in their surroundings. They should comprehend that language production disorder is the real typical of autistic person. It is also important for the next researchers who are interested in the same field to observe autistic woman to have more explorative finding. In addition, it is expected that the result of this study is going to lead the further researchers who conduct the same field of research especially those who have the same interest in language disorder by autistic as the reference or comparison that might be relevant to their research.