A Psycholinguistic study on expressive language disorder of the demented main character in Away From Her Movie

ABSTRACT

Dementia is a well-known disease which influences the way people speaking, acting, and thinking in their environment and formal conversation or even informal conversation. This disease of cognitive language disorder happens to people of all ages, including children. In Away from Her movie, the demented main character that is Fiona has difficulties in speaking and writing. It influences her daily communication with other people. Considering that, this research analyzes the kinds of expressive language disorder of the demented main character, Fiona, in Away from Her movie and the way how she produces the utterance.

This research uses descriptive qualitative design. It describes the language production and the writing ability of the main character in Away from Her movie. In addition, the data are in the forms of sentences. It gives description on the kinds of expressive language disorder in this movie. The main instrument of this research is the researcher herself. To collect the data, there are some steps done in this research: watching the movie, transcribing the script, finding the original script of the movie on the internet and comparing the data, collecting and selecting data, and organizing the data. The data are presented and analyzed by using some expressive language disorder theories proposed by David Carroll, Bayles, and Obler & Gjerlow.

Based on the finding, this research finds four types of expressive language disorder; phonological, semantic, syntactical and pragmatic language disorder. Every single type of expressive language disorder does not only come from one error of disorder in language production, but also can be more than one type. This research also finds that the demented main character produces the utterances in the aspect of the phonological disorder; there are substitution, deletion and adding of word in a sentence. In semantic errors are reduplication and distortion of the utterance in different and the same context. While in syntactical disorders, there are the prepositions and verbs put in inappropriate way and the sentence is not rule governed which also refers to incomplete sentence. And the last disorder is pragmatic disorder; politeness strategy, unrelated topic of conversation, and also difficulties in receiving information to answer the question from the interlocutor.