A Response to a Journal Entitled The Implicit Learning of Mappings between Forms and Contextually Derived Meanings by Janny H. C.

Leung and John N. Williams By Dini Sri Wahyuni/0806451/A

Introduction Language is a tool of communication that can be used by everybody to communicate with other people. People that come from different country will have different languages. So, it will make them difficult to understand each other. It has been known that there are many different languages in the world. In order to understand the language that is used in a different country, people should learn that language. The language that is going to be learned can be regarded as second language or foreign language depends on of the purposes of the learner. According to Saville-Troike (2006:2) there are three kinds of learning. Those are informal learning that takes place in naturalistic context, formal leaning that takes place in the classroom, and mixture of these setting and circumstance. In a formal learning, the teacher can use explicit learning or implicit learning. It depends on the teachers belief. Related with the explicit and implicit learning, this article is going to highlight one aspect of language that is learned through implicit learning. Since the article is a response to a journal entitled The Implicit Learning of Mappings between Forms and Contextually Derived Meanings which was written by Janny H. C. Leung and John N. Williams, I will focus on (1) how the writer explore the implicit learning of form meaning connection, and (2) what influences that time methodology has in proving that contextually derived form meaning connections might be implicitly learned. The Implicit Learning of Form Meaning Connection Janny H. C. Leung and John N. Williams, in their journal, write about the implicit learning of mappings between forms and contextually derived meanings. Their theoretical background is the previous studies with the similar topic that have been conducted before. Some of them are finite state grammars can be learned implicitly, transitional probabilities between syllables as a potential cue to lexical segmentation and phrase structure can be learned by mere exposure. Supported by those theories, the writers try to investigate that form-meaning connection can be learned implicitly. Besides that, they also stated that the study aims to extend Williams findings. In experiment 1 of William, he tried to prove that grammatical form meaning connection can be learned implicitly. In this study, the writers try to investigate whether determiners correlated with the thematic role of the accompanying noun can be learned implicitly. They use four artificial articles: gi, ro, ul and ne, where gi and ro were used before personal names referring to adults and ul and ne were used before personal names referring to children. But, they did not tell the participants that article used also depend on the thematic role of the accompanying noun phrase; gi and ul were used with agents and ro and ne were used with patient. The writers conduct the experiment through three tests. Those are picture description, reaction time test and sentence reformulation. After conducted the experiment, the result shows that the participants had implicitly learned that certain articles were associated with certain thematic roles, which supports the hypothesis that form-meaning connections can be learned implicitly. The finding of this study seems to be in contrary with the
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idea that the acquisition of meaning depends on explicit processes and more generally to the pervasive idea that awareness is necessary for learning. As mentioned by Leow (2000 cited in Leung and Williams; 2011) that empirical investigation of L2 learning have found no evidence of learning without awareness. But according to Leung and Williams, there is not necessarily a contradiction between these claims and the present findings. This is because it was assumed that in this study the participant were fully aware the critical phrase and its association to the entity within the event with which it was paired. In this sense, the participants are aware of a form meaning relationship at the moment of encoding. What they are not aware of is the specific relationship between the article and the thematic role of that entity. The Influence of Time Methodology in Proving that Form-Meaning Connection Might be Learned Implicitly In conducting the experiment, the writers use time methodology that is inspired by the serial reaction time methodology traditionally used to study implicit learning as well as by work done in vision research. According to Leung and Williams, there are three significant improvements to their new methodology which makes the current experiment potentially more sensitive to implicit learning effects. First, it uses a concurrent measure of learning, as opposed to a post training grammatically judgment test. Because the implicit learning in serial reaction time task has been inflexible and context-specific, so given the limited time for learning in a laboratory setting, task change is best avoided. Second, the training and testing task used involved comprehension rather than production. This is because knowledge has to reach a higher threshold to be expressed in production, the lesser processing demand in the task makes it more sensitive to implicit knowledge. Finally, it uses a reaction time task that introduces time pressure. In this case, the use of the reaction time test can result time pressure, so it will reduce the likelihood that participants will become aware of the mapping between articles and thematic roles. And it will encourage reliance on implicit knowledge. As stated by R. Ellis (2005 cited in Leung and Williams; 2011)Time pressure encourage the use of feel rather than rule and limited the opportunity to access metalinguistic knowledge. Conclusions Based on the experiment that has been conducted, it can be known that form meaning connection can be learned implicitly. In this sense, the participants are aware of a form meaning relationship at the moment of training, but they are not aware of the specific relationship between article and thematic role of the entity that appear in the test. This experiment become successful because the use of time methodology, especially a reaction time task that can direct to implicit learning. In this case, a reaction time task can cause the time pressure, so the participants do not have the chance to be aware of the mapping between articles and thematic roles. This journal by Leung and Williams actually has provides us with a new finding and the supported theory as well, and also it can persuade the reader to conduct further study with similar topic but has different focus.. Unfortunately, they do not provide clear and simple explanation in explaining the procedure of experiment, so it a bit hard to be imagined. Besides that, they also do not state the effect of the study, so it will make the reader confused whether it is good to apply the study in the classroom or not.

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References Leung and Williams. 2011. The Implicit Learning of Mappings between Forms and Contextually Derived Meanings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saville and Troike. 2006. Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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