Attention and Salience

by

Alessandra Zarcone

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0324

Introduction

Attention guides the focus of our perceptual experience: during visual perception, for example, attention helps us filter out relevant information and allocate cognitive resources where they are needed. Attention is strongly related to another concept, that is salience. Salience is a very widely used term in linguistics, but it was also used in visual cognition, where it is typically described as the property of (part of) a perceptual input that leaps out to us, attracting attention. The term salience itself suggest some sort of bottom-up process, implying that it is the input properties which determine what part of the input attracts our attention (think of a spot of color in a black and white picture, for example). In linguistics, bottom-up salience is related to phonological prominence or to thematization—something that is noticeable (cognitively salient) for its perceptual features and/or for its being an infrequent variety. The field of visual cognition has widely addressed attentional processes, identifying a (fast) bottom-up mechanism based on the salience (or saliency) of the input, as well as a top-down mechanism driven by our goals and intents. If a perceptual input leaps out to us because of its intrinsic properties, we may not even notice it if we are allocating our cognitive resources for a specific task, for example during visual search. In linguistic tasks, a top-down goal may also determine if we notice an incongruent input or not. More recently, in computational linguistics, attention has been used as an architectural property of encoder-decoder neural networks, for example in machine translation. Interestingly, even if this property is not aimed at realistically modeling human cognitive processes, attention is the mechanism that helps some deep learning models to identify the properties of the input that are most informative to perform a certain task. For example, while generating a French translation for an English sentence, the attention mechanism may help a neural machine translation model focus on the right part of the English input required to sequentially generate the French output.

General Overviews

The available overviews discussing the concepts of salience in linguistics typically focus on discourse (as a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon) or on sociolinguistics (as a perceptual phenomenon). Chiarcos, et al. 2011a collects different chapters approaching salience in discourse with an interdisciplinary vocation, with the intention of connecting the topic with related research in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. Its introduction, Chiarcos, et al. 2011b, references work in visual cognition and then moves from a general definition of entity salience that is defined as the prominence of a certain discourse entity, which is available for anaphoric binding. In an effort to provide a more general notion of salience, the authors define it as “the degree of relative prominence of a unit of information, at a specific point in time, in comparison to the other units of information” (p. 2). Chiarcos, et al. 2011a collects contributions on salience of discourse entities (Part 1), discourse structural salience (Part 2) and aspects of salience beyond linguistics (Part 3) before moving to extra-linguistic context and thus touching on accounts of visual salience (see Attention and Salience in Visual Cognition). Tomlin and Myachykov 2019 also defines salience in terms of the attention-grabbing property of a stimulus, but the authors include not only intrinsic properties of the stimulus but also perceiver-driven (top-down) cues which may determine what is salient. It argues that the speaker’s attentional focus is reflected by their syntactic choice which may present one or another referent as salient. Myachykov, et al. 2018 provides a summary of experimental evidence on the role of attention during production in languages with restricted and flexible word order. Blumenthal-Dramé, et al. 2017a collects contributions on the interplay of top-down and bottom-up salience, their relationship with predictability or surprisal. The editorial for that collection, Blumenthal-Dramé, et al. 2017b, programmatically introduces salience as a perceptual phenomenon, contrasting perceptual salience, driven by the stimulus (visual or auditive) in a bottom-up fashion, with top-down salience, driven by the perceiver, the situation, the discourse context, and which is typically discussed in semantics and pragmatics. Zarcone, et al. 2016 reviews work on salience in linguistics and visual cognition, in particular regarding the relationship between salience and predictability, and addresses terminological inconsistencies and the interplay between top-down and bottom-up effect and between different levels of representation during processing. Boswijk and Coler 2020 discusses how the term salience is used in different sub-fields of linguistics and how it relates with markedness, frequency/predictability, and with top-down and bottom-up factors during processing.

• Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice, Adriana Hanulíková, and Bernd Kortmann, eds. 2017a. Perceptual linguistic salience: Modeling causes and consequences. In Frontiers in Psychology. Lausanne, Switzerland: Frontiers Media.

  A research topic for Frontiers in Psychology collecting contributions on top-down (discourse) salience and perceptual, bottom-up (sociolinguistic) salience and the interplay of bottom-up and top-down factors. Contributions focus on the relation between salience and predictability/surprisal.

• Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice, Adriana Hanulíková, and Bernd Kortmann. 2017b. Editorial: Perceptual linguistic salience: Modeling causes and consequences. Frontiers in Psychology 8: 411.

  DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00411

  The editorial for the research topic for Frontiers in Psychology on perceptual linguistic salience. Bottom-up, stimulus-driven perceptual salience is contrasted with top-down, perceiver-driven salience.

• Boswijk, Vincent, and Matt Coler. 2020. What is salience? Open Linguistics 6.1: 713–722.

  DOI: 10.1515/opli-2020-0042

  An overview of different ways salience is operationalized in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, L2 acquisition, and semantics.

• Chiarcos, Christian, Berry Claus, and Michael Grabski, eds. 2011a. Salience: Multidisciplinary perspectives on its function in discourse. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

  A collection focusing on discourse. The chapters in Part 3 of this collection take not only the linguistic context into consideration but also extra linguistic context.

• Chiarcos, Christian, Berry Claus, and Michael Grabski. 2011b. Introduction: Salience in linguistics and beyond. In Salience: Multidisciplinary perspectives on its function in discourse. Edited by Christian Chiarcos, Berry Claus, and Michael Grabski, 1–28. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

  DOI: 10.1515/9783110241020.1

  This is the introduction to Chiarcos, et al. 2011a. Focus is on discourse with connections to computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. Touches on visual salience and mentions the interplay between top-down and bottom-up factors in determining salience.

• Myachykov, Andriy, Mikhail Pokhoday, and Russell Tomlin. 2018. Attention and structural choice in sentence production. In Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Edited by Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer and M. Gareth Gaskell, 529–547. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

  Reviews experimental evidence from different languages (with restricted and flexible word order) showing the interplay between attention and syntactic choices during production, determining word order choices.

• Tomlin, Russel S., and Andriy Myachykov. 2019. Attention and salience. In Cognitive linguistics—Foundations of language. Edited by Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak, 36–60. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

  Discusses salience as an attention-grabbing property which may depend on features of the stimulus itself, but also from the perceiver’s plans or intentions. Draws a parallel between visual attention and syntax, discussing how marked syntactic structures can be used to point to a reference, making it salient.

• Zarcone, Alessandra, Marten Van Schijndel, Jorrig Vogels, and Vera Demberg. 2016. Salience and attention in surprisal-based accounts of language processing. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 844.

  DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00844

  This contribution to the research topic for Frontiers in Psychology on perceptual linguistic salience is a review of existing work on salience, attention, and predictability which aims at disentangling the relationship between these concepts.