An Analysis of Speech Disorder Produced by the Character of the King’s Speech Movie

Authors

The study is conducted to observe the speech disorders produced by the character

in Britain’s movie, The King’s Speech. Speech disorder refers to a delay in producing

language and in developing the speech, it reduces the voice quality which involves the

sound, volume, and the disturbance of sound rhythm and it is difficult to be understood.

The speech disorder is classified as aphasia, apraxia, dysarthria, stuttering, and cluttering

(Feldman, 2005; & Lanier, 2010). From those types of speech disorder, the focus of the

research was stuttering found in the movie. The Guitar and Yaruss & Reardon-

Reeves’ theories are used in this research. The research applies a descriptive qualitative

method because it describes more to the phenomenon of speech disorder in the movie.

The data were taken from all of speech uttered by the character. The research reveals

the findings that there are three types of stuttering, i.e. blockings, prolongations, repetitions,

and four forms of repetitions produced by the character, i.e. monosyllabic whole word, individual

sounds or syllables, multisyllabic whole word and phrase repetition. Among them, blockings are

the most type of stuttering produced by the character and multisyllabic whole word is the rarely

form of type of speech disorder produced. In this research, psychological aspects such as trauma,

depression, anxiety, pressure, and fright are factors that can cause the character suffer from

stuttering whereas pressure and depression are the factors mostly found as the cause of speech

disorder produced by the character in the movie. To the linguists and pathologists, the contribution

is giving collaboration in researching the topic and it is expected for the next researchers to discuss

other aspects deeply in the future.

Keywords: speech disorder, stuttering, phonetic, the King’s Speech movie