On the notion of salience in spoken discourse - prominence cues shaping discourse structure and comprehension

Abstract

[Understanding spoken discourse is a complex task that implies monitoring and memorizing relations between important discourse units. Discourse comprehension has therefore been described as a process entailing a continuous competition between attention and memory resources for the sake of discourse structure building. The notion of salience has become a key issue in this debate. Salience refers to the fact that some parts of the discourse are more activated or accessible in memory than others. This is particularly relevant to set up an adequate mental representation of the ongoing discourse. In this contribution, I outline the challenges of defining salience and related processes in spoken discourse. By considering theoretical and experimental results, salience is related to prominence perception and production, and the interpretation of syntactic and prosodic prominence cues. As a result, the role of predictions in discourse processing is identified as one of the major issues to be addressed in future research.]