ABSTRACT
Psychological research uses the term salience to refer to the property of a stimulus to stand out from the rest. Salient items or features are attended, are more likely to be perceived, and are more likely to enter into subsequent cognitive processing and learning. It is useful to think of three aspects of salience: 1) The physical world, our embodiment, and our sensory systems come together to cause certain sensations to be more intense (louder, brighter, heavier, etc.) than others; 2) As we experience the world, we learn from it, and our resultant knowledge values some associations more heavily than others; and 3) We also have expectations about what is going to happen next in known contexts-we are surprised when our expectations are violated, and we pay more attention as a result. This chapter considers these three aspects of salience as they affect usage-based second language acquisition and language change.
