Attentions and Salience

• Learning is related to Attention
• We give more Attention to salient items
• Selective Attention leads to overshadowing
• Two cues presented together jointly predict outcomes
• salience (and then Attention) leads to one cue being strongly associated
• ther cue is only weakly associated (overshadowed)
• Overshadowing leads to blocking
• Blocking could model interference
• Children learn temporal adverbs like hier late (Dale and Fenson 1996)
• L2 learners go through phases where time is marked with adverbials alone (Bardovi-Harlig 1992; Meisel 1987)
• This seems to block acquisition of other cues
• temporal adverbs are highly salient (and easier) so they get stronger associations
• even though they co-occur with different Verb forms, these are hard to learn