Salience, Focus and Second Language Acquisition
Christine Shea · 2007
In the literature on second language acquisition, salience is assumed to automatically render input available for processing. The precise nature of “salience” is rarely clarified; it is simply assumed that prosodic constructs such as focal accent or stress are universally perceptually salient. We examined this relationship between intrinsic salience and second language learning by using focal accent to highlight familiar and unfamiliar lexical items in sentences presented to adult second language learners. If learners perceive unfamiliar focally accented words as perceptually salient, they will recognize them with greater accuracy than items without focal accent.