A pragmatic study on speech acts used by autistic children

ABSTRACT

People have many different ways in expressing their opinions, perceptions, and feelings which are uttered with their own linguistic system. Moreover, the linguistic system of the language users relates to the utterances they use in their social interaction. Utterances do not only convey meaning, but also count as doing something within speech act. In addition, the condition of language users is reflected in their speech processes. It means that language can be used to identify the social community of people. A person who has some problems in psyche or mental aspect, he will retard in making relationship and also in developing his linguistic system such the autistic children.

This research concerns with the kinds of illocutionary acts which is used by autistic children, the functions on uttering such acts and the uses of uttered acts. The kinds of illocutionary acts are analyzed with Searle’s five typologies of speech acts. The functions of illocutionary acts follow Leech’s four categories of illocutionary goal. In addition, the uses of speech acts such as direct and indirect are based on Searle’s theory.

The qualitative descriptive research is as the design of this study. The data are collected from the utterances of autistic children, RSI Dinoyo-Malang, in which the data are conducted from their natural conversations. They are analyzed inductively from the participant observation which is done by the researcher herself.

As the result, the researcher finds that the autistic children utter three kinds of acts, such as assertive acts, directive acts, and expressive acts; assertive acts are the most kind of illocutionary acts used by autistic children. Moreover, the autistic children do not use the commissive and the declarative acts in their speech process. It indicates that the autistic children restrict in making relationship with other personal languages. On the function of illocutionary acts, the researcher finds that the autistic children purpose their acts in collaborative function, the competitive function, and convivial function of illocutionary acts in which the collaborative function is the common used in their natural conversation. Lastly, the speech acts are usually used directly rather than indirectly within autistic children.

Finally, the researcher suggests that further researchers understand deeply about autism language with their study or what is the illocutionary act of autistic children; or, to analyze on their speech acts with other theories which is relevant to the nowadays actual-phenomena, and also to broad the speech acts study with other linguistic studies.