Abstract
What we attend to at any moment determines what we learn at that moment, and this also depends on our past learning. This focused conceptual paper concentrates on a single well-documented attention mechanism – highlighting. This phenomenon – well studied in non-linguistic but not in linguistic contexts – should be highly relevant to language learning because it is a process that (1) specifically protects past learning from being disrupted by new (and potentially spurious) associations in the learning environment, and (2) strongly constrains new learning to new information. Within the language learning context, highlighting may disambiguate ambiguous references and may be related to processes of lexical competition that are known to be critical to on-line sentence comprehension. The main sections of the paper will address (1) the highlighting phenomenon in the literature; (2) its relevancy to language learning; (3) the highlighting effect in children; (4) developmental studies concerning the effect in different contexts; and (5) a developmental mechanism for highlighting in language learning.
Highlights
SUMMARY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the present focused conceptual paper, we concentrated on a single attention mechanism – highlighting – with the aim of presenting its relevancy to early word learning
Research in language learning has preoccupied itself with what children know and how this knowledge promotes developmental changes
The assumption has been – and largely remains – that children can only learn about what is directly in front of them. Both formally and empirically, this assumption is inconsistent with much of what we understand about the contribution of dynamic temporal factors
Summary
Rather than referring to feature discrimination without much regard for temporally sensitive information, the highlighting phenomenon is based on a specific set of overlapping cues and outcomes that serve as a foundation for understanding the mechanistic components involved in asymmetrical learning These cues are presented in a specific order with collapsed information during early learning, and new combinations with some overlap are presented at a later point in time. From a highlighting perspective, overlapping frames in which the known and the subsequently learned novel word are embedded might be critical This has not been systematically examined, but it is an example of how a general mechanism such as highlighting might reveal the way in which structured language systematically cues attention. This process happens in the current moment and aids comprehension and learning over time
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