Reading Reaction Paper 1

Savinka Dinda Dewani

Firdaus Habibi, M.Pd

Introduction to Linguistic

October 24th 2022

READING REACTION PAPER

An article entitle learning verb syntax via listening: New evidence from 22- month-olds

researched by Katherine Messengera, Sylvia Yuan, and Cynthia Fisher (2015) on the issue of

the find out whether a 22-month-old child can spontaneously encode information about the

syntactic properties of verbs. The purpose of this study was to find out the difference in

acceptance of transitive and intransitive verbs shows that children are more receptive to new

transitive verbs than intractive. Moreover, Syntax coding of certain verbs through listening to

the sentence and then storing the received information with long-term memory, after which it

can guide interpretation after listening to the same verb again. Furthemore, Katherine et al.,

wanted to find out more about how to implement the role of distributional learning in learning

early verbs.

The subjects in this study were children aged 22 months who came from a monolingual

English-speaking home. The participants who joined were thirty-two toddlers with an average

age of 22.5 months to 23.9 months, all of whom were born at term. This study uses qualitative

methods to obtain research results that are sourced from detailed sample data sources and look

for differences in transitive and intractive acceptance in children. Not to mention, the object of

the dialogue video display is shown in front of the child who is accompanied by the parent, the

experiment will begin with the dialogue phase and then the video dialogue. Dialog video clips
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are 26.6-29 seconds long, separated by 3-second blank screen intervals, animations are played

in front of children, and dialogue speakers are prohibited from gesturing. to avoid inadvertently

assigning verbs through gestures.

The article writen by Katherine et al. (2015) explains that syntax begins when children

collect verb syntactic information where the partial sentence representation can interpret the

initial sentence. Additionaly, syntactic bootstrap begins when there is an innate bias towards

one-to-one mapping between noun-phrases (NPs) in predicate terms. For instance, the

researcher also assumes that children can collect and maintain distributional facts about verbs

from listening experience even though they are independent of the source of the meaning of

the verb itself. Therefore, it shows that children can find informative syntactic evidence.

Furthemore, in a test with children with the same verb separately in seeing two events

simultaneously is the only source of syntactic guidance is the child's memory of dialogue

sentences. Also, the children who had heard the transitive dialogue watched longer than those

who had seen the interactive two participant causal events. Therefore, this is one of the

prerequisites of the proposed one-to-one mapping biased distribution learning procedure,

guiding the interpretation of later verbs. The benefits of the distribution of the verb should be:

a. Sentence structure in verbs can be connected

b. Storing information in the long term

c. The appearance of the verb cooperation can be used as a signal in retrieving information.

In this article, we can realize that children at the time of the initial test did not

show a significant interaction of dialoq. These factors could not be examined further. children

who had heard transitive dialogue saw longer than two participants compared to one-participant
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events, than children who heard intransitive dialogue. This difference only appears in the same

verb condition, where children hear on the same verb test presented in the dialogue phase. For

children in different verb states, the time to look at the two participants' events did not depend

on whether they had heard transitive or intransitive dialogue. Thus, as expected, children in the

same verb condition who heard the transitive dialogue looked longer at the events of the two

participants after hearing the same verb again than children who heard the intransitive dialogue;

this dialogue effect disappears in different verb conditions. This shows that transitive dialogue

is more strongly limiting interpretation than intransitive dialogue, given the referential option.

The results of this study can be seen that children aged 22 months can learn verbs and

also aspects of their semantic structure. This finding is important because firstly, it is better to

know which transitive or intractive acceptance equation is more acceptable for children at the

age of 22 months. These results also add to the report that children aged 22 months use verb

syntax in order to understand sentences and provide the right interpretation between transitive

and intransitive.

However, it is better for the author to update this research and explore more opinions

from other studies and complement the supporting opinions of other researchers. Furthermore,

in this article, such an inappropriate choice of words can confuse the readers. Not to mention,

the addition of tables or graphs is also needed so that readers can quickly understand the

author's intent.

In light of this, this research is very useful for a mother who wants to know the

development of listening experience, children's language in detail and can absorb the lexicon

in toddlers. This article has a positive impact on the field of linguistics. Also, it makes parents

more sensitive in choosing what method to educate their children.

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References

Katherine Messengera, Sylvia Yuan, and Cynthia Fisher (2015). learning verb syntax via

listening: New evidence from 22- month-olds, 11(4): 356–368.