A Psycholinguistic Analysis on Stuttering Portrayed in The King’s Speech Movie

ABSTRAK Stuttering is a speech disorder which is characterized by the disruption in the production of speech sounds. The disruption commonly occurs at initial sound of particular words which cause stutterers involuntarily do repetition, pause, and prolongation in their speech. The involuntarily repetition, pause, and prolongation are the core symptoms of stuttering which commonly termed as speech disfluency. Thosedisfluencies have been well depicted in the history-based movie The King’s Speech which portrays the agonizing story of stuttered King George VI. Despite being silver-tongued king like his father was, he is a king who fears of speaking in front of his citizens due to his severe stuttering. Thus, this study focuses on identifying and describing the speech disfluencies, the motor behaviors and the treatments of stuttering portrayed in The King’s Speech movie under the theories proposed by Zebrowski (2003),Lavid (2003) and Hill&Campbell (1987). The research design of this study is descriptive qualitative. The main instrument of this study is the researcher herself. The data collections are the transcription of the stuttered character’s utterances which indicates the speech disfluencies and the stuttering motor behaviors. Besides, the data also contain the dialogue between the stuttering character and the speech therapist for identifying the stuttering treatments. In collecting the data there are some steps done which are: watching the movie as preliminary study, downloading the subtitle and the original screenplay, transcribing the utterances, note taking and organizing the data in the form of table. The data then are analyzed based on the theories of speech disfluencies, stuttering motor behaviors and stuttering treatments proposed by Zebrowski (2003), Lavid(2003) and Hill&Campbell (1987) Based on the findings of this study, the researcher identifies that Bertie, the stuttering character, experiences all of the types of disfluencies, they are between-word disfluency (MWWR, IN, PR, REV, and ASB) and within-word disfluency (RISS, MR, PS, and BW). In Bertie’s case the most dominant speech disfluency is ASB or Audible or Silent Block. It is because Bertie has poor coordination between his larynx and diaphragm. Besides Bertie also experiences stuttering motor behaviors such as lip tremor, head jerk, nodding, jaw jerk, gulping, blinking, eye contact avoidance and so on. Furthermore, the researcher identifies that the stuttering treatments in Bertie’s case rather different with the stuttering treatments in general. It is because the therapist also implements the elocution exercise in the treatments. Overall the treatments comprises of Psychoanalytic therapyincluding Freudian talking cure, releasing repressed anger through cursing, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mechanical therapy includingrolling on the floor while speaking, fluency shaping, stuttering modification, maneuvers that can induce fluencysuch as Auditory masking, impersonating another’s voice, singing, adaptationand some elocution exercises which consist of muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing exercise, vocal exercise, rhythmic body movementand repeating tongue twister. However, this study is limited to the stuttering phenomena depicted in movie which is considered as artificial data. Thus, this study still requires improvement from Linguistic students who are interested in conducting psycholinguistic research particularly on stuttering. The future research may broaden the data source to the actual data or they may broaden the analysis to the speech rate, the influence of lexical classes on stuttering or any linguistic problem related to stuttering