A Psycholinguistics study on Sign Language used by Heather Artinian in Sound and Fury movie

ABSTRACT

Sign language is a language, which uses manual communications instead of sound which conveys meaning simultaneously combining hands, arms or body, and facial expression to express what they thoughts or imagine. Therefore, deaf people use sign language in communication. Sign language is complicated language than oral language, therefore, studying about this phenomena will be interesting. In other side, doing this study will give us knowledge about how we should communicate with deaf people around us and never think that they do not need to interact with others. Similar with us as normal people, they also need to communicate with others. Therefore, studying about this issue will give us more knowledge and it will be very interesting when we know how to communicate with them.

This study is expected to find out the type of sign language which is used by the deaf child and how she used sign language in her daily lives.Therefore, this study focuses on seeking the types of sign language which is used by the main character in Sound and Fury movie and how she used sign language in Sound and Fury movie.

Then, to conduct this study, the descriptive qualitative is used as the research design. It gives description on the types of sign language and the sign language description which is produced by the main character. Additionally, to answer the problem, this study uses Chomsky’s theory on language acquisition.

After analyzing the data, the finding reveals that Heather uses only one type of sign language namely American Sign Language (ASL). Then, it also finds that she used 7 ways to deliver sign language those are; Finger Spelling + Facial Expression + Hand Shape, Finger Spelling + Hand Shape, Facial Expression + Body Language + Hand Shape, Facial Expression + Oral language, Facial Expression + Hand Shape, Hand Shape, and Oral Language. As Chomsky said in his theory, every child has LAD to acquire language and in this movie, Heather proves his theory. In other side, it also finds that she also uses oral language even it is not same with oral language which is produced by hearing people.

By the conclusion of this study, as social human, we have to understand what the deaf children thought by understanding their language. It is also important for the next researchers who are interested in the same field to conduct the study by trying to use different approaches and theories of language acquisition and find another type of sign language. After all, hopefully, this study could be useful at least as a guide reference to start a new research.