Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Spanish Heritage speakers
Silvina Montrul
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In this talk I report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native like
ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object
Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39
school-age bilingual children (ages 6-17) from the United States and 20 monolingual children from
Mexico completed a Story Retelling Task and a Picture Description Task. In study 2, 64 young adult
heritage speakers (ages 18-25), 23 adult immigrants (ages 40-60) to the United States, and 40 native
speakers from Mexico (ages 18-60) completed the same oral tasks. Results showed significant rates
of omission of DOM in animate direct objects in all the experimental groups from the United States
and ceiling performance in the groups from Mexico (both children and adults). I discuss how the
combined effects of reduced input, potential attrition in the first generation of immigrants, incomplete
acquisition in the second generation, and transfer from English may account for the persistent
patterns of DOM omission with animate and specific direct objects in child and adult Spanish heritage
speakers.