ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to shed light on the role of salience in linguistic development by investigating two very different types of effects, one involving perceptual prominence and the other involving semantic prominence. Specifically, the focus is on the acquisition of case markers in Korean and relative clauses. The question that now arises is simply this: what notion of salience could possibly be broad enough to unify perceptual (acoustic) prominence and semantic prominence? We propose that salience in its various instantiations is in fact a derivative notion, which (under the right characterization) can be reduced to the phenomenon of processing facilitation. Put another way, ‘salience’ is simply the name for a set of factors that facilitate processing. In the course of discussing and evaluating this claim, we will consider previous related work from the field of second language acquisition.
