Highlighting: a mechanism relevant for word learning.

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.