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Article published In: Representation and Processing in Bilingual Morphology
Edited by Jennifer R. Austin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1] 2019
► pp. 120–160

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Processing DOM in relative clauses

Salience and optionality in early and late bilinguals

 | Rutgers University
 | Rutgers University
 | Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Published online: 31 July 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16020.sag
Abstract
Early heritage bilinguals have been repeatedly found to differ from late bilinguals and from monolinguals (e.g., (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2011). Morphological errors in Spanish second language learners and heritage speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 331.155–61. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In the realm of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), both early heritage bilinguals (Montrul, S., Bhatt, R., & Girju, R. (2015). Differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian as heritage languages. Language, 91(3), 564–610. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and late bilinguals (e.g., Bowles, M., & Montrul, S. (2008). The role of explicit instruction in the L2 acquisition of the a-personal. Proceedings of the 2006 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 25–35.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; (2012). The acquisition of interpretable features in L2 Spanish: Personal a. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 15(04), 701–720. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) exhibit difficulties. DOM in a complex structure such as relative clauses (RCs) provides an ideal setting to differentiate early from late bilinguals, but it has only been explored offline (Perpiñán, S. & Moreno Villamar, I. (2013). Inversion and Case Assignment in the Language of Spanish Heritage Speakers. Proceedings of the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This study fills this gap by examining the role of word order (SVO, OSV, OVS), optionality (obligatory vs. optional contexts), and saliency (bound vs. unbound morphology) on the processing of DOM in embedded RCs in Spanish, by Spanish monolinguals, and advanced early heritage and late bilinguals of Spanish. The results of a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task revealed that all participants were more accurate but were slower in subject than object RCs, and in OSV than OVS RCs. Slower RTs in subject RCs were due to the presence of DOM, and in OSV to interpreting OVS as SVO. Also, all participants were both more accurate as well as faster in obligatory than optional DOM, unbound than bound morphology, and masculine than feminine RC NPs. These findings reveal that processing difficulties in RCs result from the interaction of word order and DOM, and that processing DOM depends on both salience and, to a lesser extent, gender. Finally, this study shows that early heritage bilinguals are closer to monolinguals than late bilinguals in terms of morphosyntactic processing patterns.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.DOM, semantic features and relative clauses in Spanish
  • 3.Early heritage and late bilinguals
  • 4.DOM in early heritage and late bilinguals of Spanish
  • 5.Online processing of relative clauses and DOM in Spanish
  • 6.The study
    • RQ1.Do EHB, LB, and M process word order in RC similarly?
    • RQ2.Do EHB, LB, and M process DOM in obligatory and optional contexts similarly?
    • RQ3.Are EHB, LB, and M affected by salience (bound/al vs. unbound/a la)?
  • 7.Methods
    • 7.1Participants
    • 7.2Materials and procedure
      • 7.2.1Screening tests
      • 7.2.2Self-paced reading task
      • 7.2.3Scoring
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Results to address RQ1 (word order in RC)
      • 8.1.1Residual RTs with masc. sing. RC NPs, and SVO, OSV, OVS orders
      • 8.1.2Residual RTs with all RC NPs (ms, fs, mp, fp), and OSV and OVS orders
    • 8.2Results to address RQ2 (DOM) and RQ3 (Salience)
      • 8.2.1Residual RTs
  • 9.Discussion
    • 9.1RQ1: Do EHB, LB, and M process word order in RC similarly?
    • 9.2RQ2: Do EHB, LB, and M process DOM in obligatory and optional contexts similarly?
    • 9.3RQ3: Are EHB, LB, and M affected by salience (bound/al vs. unbound/a la)?
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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