Yunshan Chair Professor Istvan Kecskes from New York State University was invited to give a lecture on salience in utterance production at the National Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies on June 19th, 2013.
Important issues about what salience is in a socio-cognitive (SCA) framework, differences between Graded Salience Hypothesis by Giora (1997, 2003) and salience in SCA, and how salience as a guiding mechanism functions in language production were discussed.
Finally, Professor Kecskes held (1) salience affects both comprehension and production; (2) there is a bidirectional influence between linguistic and perceptual salience; (3) selection of words is motivated by the interplay of inherent, collective, and emergent situational salience.
In the Question & Answer section, the participants raised questions and discussed with Professor Kecskes about the role of inherent salience, collective salience, and emergent situational salience in utterance production, and salience in selection of words.
