The Role of Salience in the Acquisition of Hebrew as a Second Language

Implicit Statistical Learning in Naturalistic and Instructed Morphosyntactic Attainment: An Aptitude‐Treatment Interaction Design

“…The suggestion that age effects in ultimate attainment can be best understood as a loss of implicit learning ability largely rests on evidence from two types of interactions: AoO with context of learning and AoO with aptitude, though it is likely that the salience of structures presents a third type of interaction (DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, Ravid, & Shi, 2017). It is well established that the processes and outcomes of SLA are conditioned by the context of acquisition because this context influences the type of input, the quantity of input, and the usage patterns of the input, among other things.…”

Persistence of interference from L1 Arabic in written Hebrew

“…Psychophysical salience concerns bottom-up processing and "how easy it is to hear or perceive a given structure" (Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2005, p. 47) by virtue of physical linguistic properties, such as phonetic substance, stress, syllabicity, sonority and position in the utterance (DeKeyser et al, 2018;Ellis N., 2018;Gass et al, 2017). Closed class grammatical function words, clitics and morphosyntactic features are non-salient, being short and low in stress to begin with.…”

Perceptual salience and structural ambiguity resolution

“…In particular, they note that although the masculine category is the default in most languages and, as such, is often formally unmarked, the nouns associated with this category in this study were inflectionally marked, which might have made this morphology more noticeable to comprehenders. That is to say, while this study focused on the influence of perceptual salience-as defined by differences in orthographic length-on L2 comprehension processes, the researchers emphasize that the overall salience of a linguistic form is likely determined by a number of components (for further discussion, see Simoens et al, 2018, p. 125; see also DeKeyser et al, 2018;Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001).…”

“…For instance, as mentioned above, DeKeyser and colleagues (2018) found that salience had a greater influence on the L2 acquisition of Hebrew grammatical morphology for learners at later ages of acquisition. These age-related effects were taken to indicate that salience primarily affects explicit L2 learning processes, which are arguably more important for older learners (for discussion, see DeKeyser et al, 2018). If it is the case that the influence of perceptual salience is largely limited to such learning processes, this factor should have relatively little effect on adult L1 sentence processing.…”

“…Before proceeding, it is important to note that the properties that make a linguistic element more or less salient are a matter of debate. Although recent research—and in particular L2 acquisition work by DeKeyser and colleagues (DeKeyser et al, 2018; Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001)—has gone a long way in terms of identifying a number of phonetic, (morpho)phonological, syntactic, semantic, and distributional factors that might influence salience, the precise contribution of these factors has yet to be determined. However, it is possible to formulate a working definition of perceptual salience that will help to frame the discussion to follow.…”