Salience in Second Language Acquisition

Susan M. Gass, Patti Spinner, Jennifer Behney, Susan M. Gass, Patti Spinner, Jennifer Behney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138225671
• eBook ISBN: 9781315399003
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Salience in Second Language Acquisition brings together contributions from top scholars of second language acquisition (SLA) in a comprehensive volume of the existing literature and current research on salience. In the first book to focus exclusively on this integral topic, the editors and contributors define and explore what makes a linguistic feature salient in sections on theory, perpetual salience, and constructed salience. They also provide a history of SLA theory and discussion on its contemporary use in research. An approachable introduction to the topic, this book is an ideal supplement to courses in SLA, and a valuable resource for researchers and scholars looking for a better understanding of the subject.

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Salience in Second Language Acquisition and Related Fields

Susan M. Gass, Patti Spinner, and Jennifer Behney

Preliminaries

When considering how salience is used within the context of second language acquisition (SLA), there are at least two angles from which to consider the construct. On the one hand, we need to understand what is salient. Are there linguistic features that themselves are salient and/or can features be made salient (perceptual and constructed salience, respectively)? In both cases, the assumption is that salience is a factor that makes something easier to perceive. On the other hand, we need to understand how salience is used by language learners. This book is an attempt to understand both dimensions.

The word salient is frequently used in everyday speech, but it often lacks precision in that the determination of what is and what is not salient is often left to an individual to figure out. The American Heritage Dictionary defines salient as “projecting or jutting beyond a line or surface; protruding up or out.” Merriam-Webster¹ has as its first listing “moving by leaps or springs.” According to the online Oxford Dictionaries, the more common current usage listed as its first meaning is “most noticeable or important; prominent; conspicuous”².

The origins of the term go back to 16th century heraldry from the Latin ‘salire’ meaning ‘to leap’ with the idea of an animal on its hind legs ready to leap, as in a lion salient. Its first use in modern English came in 1836, again referring to an animal, but with a slightly different meaning: “What fresh, clean, and youthful salience in the lynx” (Hunt, 1836, p. 479³). However, it was not until 1938 that the word salience began to be used in academia, particularly in the area of personality studies.

The different proportions of salience and embedding give the process and content of every experience its special character.

(Stern, 1938)

and

At other times … consciousness is embedded … more deeply; there is less clearness, less salience. Salience represents an act of pointing, a directedness of the person toward something that at the moment has special significance for him.

(Allport, 1938)

Salience has been and is currently relevant to numerous areas of language-related research. In fact, in recent years there have been in depth treatments of salience (e.g., Chiarcos, Claus, & Grabski, 2011; Giora, 2003) and even a workshop held in Freiburg, Germany (2014) with the title of Perceptual Linguistic Salience. In describing their workshop, the organizers refer to significant work on semantic-pragmatic salience that can account, inter alia for the “interpretation of figurative utterances, … implicatures, and discursive links”⁴ and note that perceptual salience is only beginning to receive significant attention. They distinguish between bottom-up and top-down perceptual salience. Top-down salience refers to a stimulus that is ‘cognitively preactivated.’ An example of this type of salience occurs when “a stimulus is expected because it is part of a cognitive routine, if it has recently been mentioned, or due to current intentions of the perceiver.” The attention driven to this stimulus comes from the individual. In bottom-up salience, it is the stimulus itself which attracts attention. A particular stimulus may stand out (be salient) because of physical properties, but also because of a surprise factor when expectations are violated. Gass (1988, p. 202), in her discussion of stages of acquisition alludes to this when she notes that “at more advanced stages of learning, stages at which expectations of language data are well established, something which is unusual because of its infrequency may stand out for a learner.” Different types of salience are elaborated on in Chapter 2 of this volume, as well as in other chapters.

This volume deals specifically with second language research. However, before discussing our particular context, we frame the discussion more broadly and refer to research in other related contexts. We select four contexts for brief mention: child language acquisition, sign language, sociolinguistics/dialect contact, and language change.

Child Language

The construct of salience has played a role in the understanding of how children learn language. What emerges is a picture of the relevance of salience, typically in combination with other factors. Literature exists to show how salience is significant in areas of phonology (Dietrich, Swingley, & Werker, 2007; Peters, 1985), lexis (Bortfeld, Shaw, & Depowski, 2013; Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000; Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Hennon, 2006), morphology (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Theakston, 2007), and syntax (auxiliaries) (Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2005). We provide brief examples of how salience plays a role in each of these areas.

In morphology, Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2007) investigate English multi-word negation over a period of approximately one year (2;3–3;4), finding that the child’s development followed the order of no → not →‘nt. When considering the speed with which the child traversed these negators, the authors concluded that their results supported an input-driven model. Important for our purposes is their claim that no is more salient in the input primarily because it occurs frequently in the input as a single-word utterance. In other words, it is salience that contributes to its early adoption.

Dietrich et al. (2007) investigated the acquisition of phonological distinctions by young children (18 months) from two native language backgrounds: Dutch and English. Their interest was: 1) the loss of ability to utilize speech sounds that are not relevant to their language, and 2) which phonetic cues are relevant for lexical distinctions. They invoke salience as a key construct and argue that ‘salient phonetic variation’ (e.g., vowel duration) is used in language-specific ways. In other words, “children’s phonological knowledge already guides their interpretation of salient phonetic variation” (p. 16027). We return to a similar concept later in this chapter (“Second Language Acquisition”) in a discussion of work by Carroll (2012) in which certain prerequisite knowledge is necessary before salience becomes relevant.

Theakston et al. (2005), taking into account generativist and usage-based accounts, consider the acquisition of English auxiliaries, specifically focusing on auxiliary omission in early speech. They analyzed longitudinal data from children who at the beginning ranged from 1;8–2;0 years. On the basis of their data, they eliminated a number of explanations including a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations, input patterns, and innate maturational constraints. This led them to conclude that ‘single-factor models’ (p. 268) are inappropriate to account for the omission of auxiliaries. Rather, there are many factors that serve to influence the acquisition of auxiliary syntax, phonological salience being one. However, it is not yet clear what the precise relative contribution of each of these (and possibly other) factors is to acquisition.

Significant attention has been paid to the acquisition of lexis as a function of salience (e.g., Bortfeld et al., 2013; Hollich et al., 2000; Pruden et al., 2006). Hollich et al. (2000) summarize a sequence of experimental studies of young children (12 months) and point to salience as one—but certainly not the only—contributing factor to word learning. They make the argument that children as young as 12 months are able to detect a variety of cues (e.g., perceptual salience, eye-gaze), but what they lack is the ability to coordinate various cues in word learning. Once cues are able to be coordinated, word learning moves apace. They conclude by saying:

children are sensitive to many different sources of information and will change their weightings of these sources at different times in development and in different contexts. Children need attentional and social cues as well as conceptual constraints to overcome the word learning problem.

(p. 114)

In other words, salience has been and still is important throughout the area of research into child language acquisition as it is in bilingual and subsequent language learning. In fact, the 2017 issue of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Mackey, 2017) contains 18 articles focusing on children’s language learning, with the topic of salience being mentioned multiple times.

Sign Language

Research on signed languages as first and second languages has also contributed to the discussion of this construct. In this section, we refer to a few ways that salience has been dealt with in that acquisition context—in particular phonology, visual context, and hand movement.

Phonology (e.g., handshapes in signed languages) is one aspect that has received treatment. We point to an early study (Brentari, 1993) which attempts to establish a sonority hierarchy (visual salience) for American sign language (ASL). The features that the author deals with are path (direction), handshape change, orientation change, and secondary movements. Her basic premise suggests a significant role for perceptual salience. In her words, perceptual salience “underlies the notion of sonority for both signed and spoken languages” (p. 302). Unlike studies in other acquisition contexts, she considers dynamic aspects of perceptual salience given that ASL relies on movement and proposes a scale of perceptual salience to determine the sonority of elements when comparing orientation change versus handshape change.

Another study involving salience in sign languages comes from work by Harris (2001), who compares input (signed and spoken) to children (18 months) with “profound prelingual deafness” (p. 177). The input comes from mothers who are deaf and fluent signers of British Sign Language and mothers who are hearing and enrolled at the time in a signing program. The author’s concern was the identification of the type of input that the children received. Among other criteria, one important one was whether the utterance had a salient context that was visible to the child. In her study (as in other studies dealing with visual context), a context is salient if it refers “to an object or action to which the child was attending at the time of the utterance” (p. 178). In other words, the ‘here and now’ becomes important in signed language learning as it is in spoken language learning as it draws children’s attention to the sign. Those who were fluent signers were more successful in providing the salient context, resulting in a “more secure context for early language development” (p. 177).

A more recent study (Thompson, 2006) uses perceptual salience to differentiate ultimate attainment between manual versus non-manual agreement, the latter being eye-gaze. Salience in this work is identified though hand movements (large articulators) which are more perceptually salient than smaller articulators (the eyes). She considers salience to be ‘attentionally-based’ with the most salient information coming from the focus of attention. In a later paper, Thompson, Vinson, Fox, and Vigliocco (2013), using a visual-world paradigm to investigate lexical access, find that gaze time increased with features that shared visually salient phonological properties such as location and movement, leading them to conclude that lexical processing “is likely driven by perceptual salience” (p. 1450).

Sociolinguistics/Dialect Contact

The most comprehensive treatment of salience in sociolinguistics comes from Rácz (2013), who makes a distinction between cognitive and social salience. Cognitive salience is “the objective property of linguistic variation that makes it noticeable to the speaker” (p. 1). Social salience, not surprisingly, emphasizes context. Interestingly, while salience is often associated with high frequency in some approaches (see discussion of usage-based accounts in Ellis, Chapter 2), Rácz argues for a seemingly contradictory viewpoint. That is, features are salient when they have a “low probability of occurrence” (p. 9). In particular, salience “is a bottom-up notion, connected to a principal part of human perception, surprise. An entity is surprising if its presence has a high information value compared to its surroundings—that is, when its presence is not probable, but unexpected” (p. 9) (see Ellis, Chapter 2) for his discussion of this aspect of salience). In sum, Rácz defines cognitive salience as mainly surprisal: “A segment is cognitively salient if it has a large surprisal value when compared to an array of language input” (p. 37). Interestingly, he argues that socially salient variables, which are often taken as indices of social identity, are necessarily cognitively salient, which is how they attracted attention in the first place. For this reason, the concepts can be blended to a certain extent:

Cognitive salience is an attribute of variation that allows language users to pick up on it, whereas social salience means that variation is already used to carry social indexation. Socially salient variables … are always cognitively salient (one way or another), which means that the term salience can be used without risk of confusion.

(p. 37)

Related to issues discussed previously are those related to dialect contact. MacLeod (2015) presents different ways of determining phonetic accommodation. One is what she refers to as the criteria-list approach and the other is the experimental approach. In the former, scholars (e.g., Trudgill, 1986) list criteria that are responsible for dialect accommodation, of which salience is an important one. Salience is what makes speakers aware of certain linguistic features. On the other hand, in the experimental approach, experimental techniques are used to determine what is or is not salient; for instance, MacLeod (2012) uses a perception task. Interesting is MacLeod’s discussion of gradient salience (see discussion in the following section of work by Giora, 2003; and Kecskes, 2006) in which the argument is that through experimental work, one can quantify scales of salience (as oppo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• 1 Salience in Second Language Acquisition and Related Fields
• PART I Salience in SLA Theory
• PART II Perceptual Salience in SLA
• PART III Constructed Salience in SLA
• PART IV Salience in Context
• Index