The notion of salience may thus denote both a temporary activation state of mental concepts (cognitive salience) and an inherent and consequently more or less permanent property of entities in the real world (ontological salience). It follows from these definitions that there is a two-way relationship between salience and entrenchment. On the one hand, ontologically salient entities attract our attention more frequently than nonsalient ones. As a result, cognitive events related to the processing of ontologically salient entities will occur more frequently and lead to an earlier entrenchment of corresponding cognitive units, or concepts. This is perhaps most noticeable in the early stages of language acquisition when active, movable, or otherwise interesting—and therefore salient—entities such as people, animals, or colorful and noisy toys, which have a relatively high potential of attracting children’s attention, stand a better chance of early entrenchment as cog- nitive units than less salient entities, such as walls or carpets. It must be emphasized, however, that there is no one-to-one causal link between ontological salience and entrenchment, because from a certain point onwards, children acquire the ability of adults to conceptualize one entity, say a given dog, via a whole range of differ- ently entrenched concepts such as ‘dog’, ‘poodle’, ‘mongrel’, ‘animal’, or ‘creature’. This shows that it is, of course, not real-world entities themselves that get en- trenched but possible concepts of entities.