Abstract Acquiring morphology poses a considerable challenge in second language acquisition (SLA), highlighting the need to explore methods that facilitate this task for L2 learners. One potential facilitator is salience, which is theorized to aid language acquisition by directing learners’ attention to certain linguistic elements. To empirically investigate the impact of one type of salience, perceptual salience, a text-based eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 68 L1 Dutch speakers who read 240 sentences in Englishti , an English-based semi-artificial language featuring perceptually high-salient ( -ulp ) and low-salient ( -o ) morphemes according to length. Learning context was manipulated with participants being either assigned to an intentional or an incidental paradigm. The task consisted of two phases: a learning phase involving input flooding of the target morphemes followed by content-related questions, and a testing phase where participants completed a grammaticality judgment task on Englishti sentences, half of which were familiar from the learning phase and half of which were new. The results revealed a significant influence of salience, mediated by learning context and English proficiency, on fixation durations, thus empirically confirming the effect of perceptual salience on attention allocation in L2 morphology acquisition.
Cipitria et al. (Thu,) studied this question.