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.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 30 August 2012.
All research outputs
#18,028,965
of 26,367,306 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#21,843
of 35,210 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#177,785
of 254,603 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#315
of 481 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,367,306 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 21st percentile – i.e., 21% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 35,210 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.8. This one is in the 31st percentile – i.e., 31% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 254,603 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 19th percentile – i.e., 19% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 481 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 28th percentile – i.e., 28% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
