Perceptual Linguistic Salience: Modeling Causes and Consequences

Abstract

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the notion of salience in linguistics and related disciplines. While in top-down salience, perceivers endogenously direct their attention to a certain stimulus, in the bottom-up salience, it is the stimulus itself which attracts attention. In prototypical cases of bottom-up salience, the stimulus stands out because it is incongruous with a given ground by virtue of intrinsic physical characteristics. But a stimulus may also cause surprise by virtue of deviating from a cognitive ground, e.g., when violating social or probabilistic expectations. This has prompted researchers to examine the relationship between expectations and the perceptual salience of linguistic stimuli in new ways. This e-book features contributions from different scientific frameworks. The reader will find commentaries, reviews, and original research articles on models of sociolinguistic and morphological salience, the role of attention, affect, and predictability, and on how salient items are processed, categorized and learned. Taken together, the articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of how the perceptual salience of linguistic forms and variants can be theoretically framed and methodologically operationalized in different areas of linguistic processing.