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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 13:6 (2023) ► pp.801–829

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Variation versus deviation

Early bilingual acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking

ORCiD logo with link | The University of Texas at San Antonio
Published online: 12 May 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21001.req
Abstract
Naturalistic production research has reported that, unlike monolingual peers, children acquiring Spanish as a heritage language omit Differential Object Marking (DOM) with animate objects since the earliest stages of language development. However, the previous studies investigating longitudinal monolingual and bilingual corpora cannot be compared to each other given their different treatment of language-internal variation in DOM use along the animacy scale. Whereas monolingual results excluded contexts predicted to be variable, bilingual results combined them with categorical contexts increasing the rate of “errors” in the bilingual group. This study reexamines naturalistic production by monolingual and early bilingual children as well as by their caregivers using a common methodology that distinguishes categorical from variable DOM contexts. The results indicate that longitudinal corpora covering child heritage speakers’ development up to age three do not show evidence of greater omission of DOM compared to monolingual children once variability along the animacy scale is accounted for. By contrast, young monolingual and bilingual children’s use of Spanish DOM seems target-like based on their input.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Spanish DOM
      • 2.1.1The differential and living nature of object marking in modern Spanish
      • 2.1.2A formalization of the use of DOM across contexts
      • 2.1.3Variation in Spanish DOM with nonhuman animate DOs
    • 2.2Spanish DOM: Adult HS use and acquisition by children
      • 2.2.1Divergence in DOM use between monolingual and heritage adult speakers
      • 2.2.2Monolingual and bilingual children’s early acquisition of DOM
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Case studies data
    • 3.2Procedure
    • 3.3Results
      • 3.3.1Monolingual children
      • 3.3.2Bilingual children exposed to only Spanish in the home
      • 3.3.3Bilingual children exposed to Spanish and English in the home
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Lack of group differences in early DOM use
    • 4.2Variation in the input with nonhuman animate DOs and innovative uses
  • Notes
  • References
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