Abstract
The notion of salience has been singled out as the explanatory factor for a diverse range of linguistic phenomena. In particular, perceptual salience (e.g., visual salience of objects in the world, acoustic prominence of linguistic sounds) and semantic-pragmatic salience (e.g., prominence of recently mentioned or topical referents) have been shown to influence language comprehension and production. A different line of research has sought to account for behavioral correlates of cognitive load during comprehension as well as for certain patterns in language usage using information-theoretic notions, such as surprisal. Surprisal and salience both affect language processing at different levels, but the relationship between the two has not been adequately elucidated, and the question of whether salience can be reduced to surprisal / predictability is still open. Our review identifies two main challenges in addressing this question: terminological inconsistency and lack of integration between high and low levels of representations in salience-based accounts and surprisal-based accounts. We capitalize upon work in visual cognition in order to orient ourselves in surveying the different facets of the notion of salience in linguistics and their relation with models of surprisal. We find that work on salience highlights aspects of linguistic communication that models of surprisal tend to overlook, namely the role of attention and relevance to current goals, and we argue that the Predictive Coding framework provides a unified view which can account for the role played by attention and predictability at different levels of processing and which can clarify the interplay between low and high levels of processes and between predictability-driven expectation and attention-driven focus.
Highlights
THE ATTENTIVE BRAIN AND THE ANTICIPATING BRAINThe perceptual experience we are continuously subjected to while awake is an “embarrassment of riches” (Wolfe and Horowitz, 2004): for example, when we process a visual scene, we need to focus our maximum visual acuity on the most useful or interesting parts of the scene (Mackworth and Morandi, 1967)
We have shown that some aspects of linguistic salience, which capture the comprehender’s attention in a bottom-up fashion, can be conflated with surprisal, but discourse- and situation-based salience cannot, as they are deeply intertwined with goals, tasks, and attention
Prediction is a key aspect of cognition and in particular of language processing: comprehenders draw context-based expectations about upcoming input at different levels, relying and conditioning on multiple levels of representation at each point in processing, and experiencing a decrease in processing costs when the expectations are met and an increase when they are not
Summary
The perceptual experience we are continuously subjected to while awake is an “embarrassment of riches” (Wolfe and Horowitz, 2004): for example, when we process a visual scene, we need to focus our maximum visual acuity (the fovea) on the most useful or interesting parts of the scene (Mackworth and Morandi, 1967). The first challenge to face is undoubtedly a lack of terminological consistency among linguists: while in visual cognition the term salience refers to bottom-up stimulus-driven perceptual salience, linguists use the term to refer either to bottom-up, perceptual properties of incongruous stimuli (lowpredictability stimuli, expected to require additional processing effort, Hanulíková et al, 2012; Blumenthal-Dramé et al, 2014), or to top-down, discourse-driven properties of accessible, congruous or recently accessed entities (high-predictability stimuli, expected to facilitate processing, Claus, 2011). We discuss how surprisal models can be extended to account for the role of salience and attention (Section 5)
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