%0 Journal Article %A Rast, Rebekah %A Dommergues, Jean-Yves %T Towards a characterisation of saliency on first exposure to a second language %D 2003 %J EUROSLA Yearbook %V 3 %N 1 %P 131-156 %@ 1568-1491 %R https://doi.org/10.1075/eurosla.3.09ras %I John Benjamins %X This paper attempts to shed light on the question of what in the input is perceived and processed by the learner, and how it is processed upon first contact with a target language. Subjects were French learners of Polish who had had no contact with Polish or any other Slavic language before the onset of the project. They were tested on a sentence repetition task before receiving any Polish instruction, after 4 hours of instruction, and again after 8 hours. The results suggest that even as little as 8 hours of exposure induces a recognizable interlanguage; that the influence of global input can be predicted by word length, word stress, phonemic distance, transparency, position and frequency; and that the role these factors play evolves over time. Together the results suggest a way to characterise the notion of saliency in the input. %U https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/eurosla.3.09ras