Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers*

Abstract

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish (Juan conoce a María "Juan knows Maria") is a well known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage speakers (Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Montrul, 2002, 2004), including DOM (Montrul, 2004a). This study assesses the extent of incomplete knowledge of DOM in Spanish heritage speakers raised in the United States by comparing it with knowledge of DOM in fully competent native speakers. Experiment 1 examined whether omission of a affected grammatical competence, as measured by the linguistic behavior of 67 heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers in an oral production task and in a written acceptability judgment task. Experiment 2 followed up on the results of the acceptability judgment task with 13 monolingual speakers and 69 heritage speakers, and examined whether problems with DOM generalize to other instances of structural and inherent dative case, including ditransitive verbs and gustar-type psychological verbs. Results of the two experiments confirmed that heritage speakers' recognition and production of DOM is probabilistic, even for speakers with advanced proficiency in Spanish. This suggests that many heritage speakers' grammars may not actually instantiate inherent case. We argue that language loss under reduced input conditions in childhood is, in this case, like "going back to basics": it leads to simplification of the grammar by letting go of the non-core options, while retaining the core functional structure. Sentences included in the Acceptability Judgment Tasks Experiment 1 Without a-marking (*DOM) *Marisa conoce mi hermana. *El estudiante llamó la profesora. *Mi hermano invitó Pedro a la fiesta. *Paulina contrató Rodolfo para el nuevo puesto. *Jorge ama Carolina apasionadamente. Missing a with indirect objects (Ddouble object construction or *DOC) *Armando envió una amiga flores. *Estela devolvió María el libro. *La profesora enseñó el estudiante la lección. *Francisco confió su madre un secreto. *Carlos pidió su novia un favor. Experiment 2 Differential Object Marking animate (with a-marking) Marisa conoce a mi hermana. El estudiante visitó a la profesora. Mi hermano escuchó a Pedro en la fiesta. Jorge ama a Carolina apasionadamente. Mi hermana vio a Carmen ayer. *animate (no a-marking) *Pedro conoce el chef. *El jefe escuchó la secretaria. *Patricia invitó mi madre a su graduación. *Mi abuela ama todos sus nietos. *Mi padre vio mi hermano ayer. *inanimate (with a-marking) *Juan visitó a la biblioteca. *La profesora conoce a libros interesantes. *Mi madre ama a las pinturas de Dalí. *Joaquín vio a la última película de Batman. *Teresa escuchó a la sonata en B menor. inanimate (no a-marking) Patricio visitó el Museo del Prado.

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

“…Polinsky (1997Polinsky ( , 2006 discusses the erosion of the Russian genitive of negation, which is learned late in L1 acquisition and is generally quite infrequent. Similar erosion has been documented in Spanish (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009, 2010. Spanish does not have a genitive of negation, but it does have differential object marking (DOM) with animate, specific direct objects, as well as differential subject marking (DSM) with dative subjects of psychological predicates.…”

“…It is probably more accurate to treat this phenomenon not as the overgeneralization of the nominative per se but as the extensive use of the unmarked case; general, unmarked case accounts for the bulk of object forms (replacing the accusative). The same change, from differential object marking with a to an unmarked object case, is observed in Heritage Spanish (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles, 2009). …”

Selectivity in L1 Attrition: Differential Object Marking in Spanish Near-Native Speakers of English

“…Montrul and Bowles (2009) tried to account for these findings proposing that they could be the result of the lack of perceptual salience of the structure in question. In many occasions, the final vowel of the verb and the preposition are reduced to one sound if the verb ends in [a], as in (4), or they are diphthongized, as in (5), which makes the preposition difficult to be recognized.…”

Heritage, Second-Language and Native Speakers’ Intuitions on Deictic Verbs in Spanish: Beyond the Linguist’s Intuitions

“…Montrul (2010a) cites various studies that suggest that heritage speakers are outperformed by native speakers in a variety of grammatical measures. Montrul (2010a) notes that heritage speakers of Spanish perform worse than their monolingual counterparts in gender marking (Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán 2008), the subjunctive mood (Silva-Corvalán, 1994), usage of the dative preposition "a" (Montrul & Bowles, 2009), and differential object marking (Montrul, 2010b). SilvaCorvalán (1991SilvaCorvalán ( , 1994 has shown that HS suffer considerable L1 attrition, in part caused by the contact situation between their L1 and the majority language, English.…”