ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we present an empirical study documenting the role salience plays in the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language, both as a main effect and in interaction with age of acquisition. Participants were 52 Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel, between 2-40 years old at the time of immigration; they took a 200-item grammaticality judgment test of Hebrew morphology. Using the definitions of various aspects of salience from Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001), we divided 22 aspects of Hebrew morphology into three categories: high, mid, and low salience. Age interacted with salience as a whole in the sense that the level of salience played a bigger role as age of acquisition increased. These findings fit well with our claim (DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, & Ravid, 2010) that the relative importance of explicit learning processes increases with age, given that explicit learning is more sensitive to salience than implicit learning.
