Highlighting: A Mechanism Relevant for Word Learning

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.