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This paper attempts to shed light on the question of what in the input is perceived and processed by the learner, and how it is processed upon first contact with a target language. Subjects were French learners of Polish who had had no contact with Polish or any other Slavic language before the onset of the project. They were tested on a sentence repetition task before receiving any Polish instruction, after 4 hours of instruction, and again after 8 hours. The results suggest that even as little as 8 hours of exposure induces a recognizable interlanguage; that the influence of global input can be predicted by word length, word stress, phonemic distance, transparency, position and frequency; and that the role these factors play evolves over time. Together the results suggest a way to characterise the notion of saliency in the input.

The VILLA project ("Varieties of Initial Learners in Language Acquisition: Controlled classroom input and elementary forms of linguistic organisation") studies the very first phases of the process of language acquisition and establishes a tight link between learners' achievements in different domains of linguistic knowledge and the input they received. Novice adult and child learners with five different native languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian) were exposed to fourteen hours of input in Polish that was provided in a communicative classroom setting. Whereas the exposure conditions and the content of the input were kept constant for all learner groups, the age of the learners and the amount of metalinguistic information provided was varied between groups. Acquisition of different target language properties (phonology, morpho-syntax, discourse-pragmatics) was observed longitudinally through a series of tasks and experiments repeated over time. The paper presents the methodological set-up of the project and summarizes first results.

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