ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of perceptual salience, or the detectability, of morphosyntactic feature contrasts within a feature reassembly framework (Lardiere, 2009). Under this approach, L2 learners are presumed to search for morpholexical items in the L2 whose features appear to correspond to those in the L1-for example, those expressing plural number, negation, case, definiteness, etc. This position contrasts with that of so-called representational deficit views. In this chapter I discuss possible differences in detectability between interpretable and uninterpretable features; that is, whether formal contrasts in uninterpretable features are subject to more frequent or more significant signal-to-noise reductions than interpretable feature contrasts. I argue that, in addition to the robustness of phonetic cues to feature contrasts, the detectability and complexity of co-occurrence conditions on the expression of a particular feature play a major role in the acquisition of that feature.
