Editorial: Perceptual Linguistic Salience: Modeling Causes and Consequences

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the notion of salience in linguistics and related disciplines. The attention literature distinguishes two broad types of perceptual salience (Summerfield and Egner, 2009; Awh et al., 2012). First, a stimulus can be salient—i.e., foremost in one’s mind—because it is cognitively preactivated. This type of salience, sometimes referred to as top-down salience, may occur if a stimulus is expected because it is part of a cognitive routine, if it has recently been mentioned, or due to current intentions of the perceiver. Research on salience as a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon has shown that top-down salience can account for systematic preferences in the interpretation of figurative utterances, pronominal antecedents, implicatures, and discursive links (Geeraerts, 2000; Giora, 2003; Chiarcos et al., 2011; Jaszczolt and Allan, 2011). While in top-down salience, perceivers endogenously direct their attention to a certain stimulus, in the second type of salience, 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 (Clark, 2013). This has prompted researchers to examine the relationship between expectations and the perceptual salience of linguistic stimuli in new ways (Hanulíková et al., 2012; Rácz, 2012; Hanulíková and Carreiras, 2015; Blumenthal-Dramé, 2016a,b; Roller, 2016; Blumenthal-Dramé et al., 2017), and inspired us to organize a workshop devoted to this particular area. In October 2014, the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS) hosted the workshop “Perceptual linguistic salience: Modeling causes and consequences”, organized by the editors of this volume. Bringing together researchers from psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics, the workshop sought to explore the notion of perceptual salience and its explanatory potential for the domains of language processing, variation, and change. Several questions arising from the stimulating discussions were listed in the call for papers for this Research Topic and included the following: