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The Acquisition of Spanish in Understudied Language Pairings
Edited by Tiffany Judy and Silvia Perpiñán
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 3] 2015
► pp. 281–308

The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Spanish by Turkish speakers

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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). This study investigates the acquisition of DOM in Spanish by native speakers of Turkish, a language that exemplifies DOM on the basis of case marking. Twenty native speakers of Spanish and 32 Turkish-speaking learners of Spanish completed a written production, a written comprehension, and a bimodal acceptability judgment task. Our results show that Turkish learners of Spanish are quite successful at acquiring feature specification and distribution of DOM even at low levels of proficiency. Keywords: Differential object marking; Turkish; Spanish, case; L2 acquisition

Published online: 18 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.3.11mon
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