Salience (language)

Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as 'most noticeable or important.' The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media.'This model is part of wider Dichotic theory of salience, according to which a stimulus is salient either when it is incongruent in a certain context to a perceiver's schema, or when it is congruent in a certain context to a perceiver's goal. According to the four propositions of the model, in-salient stimuli are better recalled, affect both attention and interpretation, and are moderated by the degree of perceivers' comprehension (i.e., activation, accessibility, and availability of schemata), and involvement (i.e., personal relevance of the stimuli). Results of two empirical studies on print advertisements show that in-salient ad messages have the strongest impact in triggering ad processing which, in turn, leads to consumer awareness.'“We estimate brand salience at the point of purchase, based on perceptual features (color, luminance, edges) and how these are influenced by consumers’ search goals. We show that the salience of brands has a pervasive effect on search performance, and is determined by two key components: The bottom-up component is due to in-store activity and package design. The top-down component is due to out-of-store marketing activities such as advertising.” Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as 'most noticeable or important.' The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media. In semiotics (the study of signs or symbolism), salience refers to the relative importance or prominence of a part of a sign. The salience of a particular sign when considered in the context of others helps an individual to quickly rank large amounts of information by importance and thus give attention to that which is the most important. This process keeps an individual from being overwhelmed with information overload. Meaning can be described as the 'system of mental representations of an object or phenomenon, its properties and associations with other objects and/or phenomena. In the consciousness of an individual, meaning is reflected in the form of sensory information, images and concepts.' It is denotative or connotative, but the sign system for transmitting meanings can be uncertain in its operation or conditions may disrupt the communication and prevent accurate meanings from being decoded. Further, meaning is socially constructed and dynamic as the culture evolves. That is problematic because an individual's frame of reference and experience may produce some divergence from some of the prevailing social norms. So the salience of data will be determined by both situational and emotional elements in a combination relatively unique to each individual. For example, a person with an interest in botany may allocate greater salience to visual data involving plants, and a person trained as an architect may scan buildings to identify features of interest. A person's world view or Weltanschauung may predispose salience to data matching those views. Because people live for many years, responses become conventional. At a group or community level, the conventional levels of significance or salience are slowly embedded in the sign systems and culture, and they cannot arbitrarily be changed.For example, the first thing seen in a poster may be the title or picture of a face. The noun “salience” derives from the Latin word saliens - ‘leaping, or bounding’. In a human embryo, the heart tissue is beating and leaping. A Native American may pay no attention to Columbus Day protests until after instruction in tribal and historical Indian traditions (priming). After gaining new cultural insights, these protests may become “salient.”