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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 5:1 (2015) ► pp.62–90

Differential object marking in Spanish-English early bilinguals

| Syracuse University

This paper examines the emergence and acquisition of marked accusative objects (Differential Object Marking, DOM, Bossong, 1991) in the spontaneous production of seven early Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth, 2L1) with different linguistic environments. The main finding is that the 2L1 group examined did not acquire differentially marked objects in the period studied, up to 3;6, nor did they behave similarly to Spanish monolingual children (L1) acquiring DOM (Montrul, 2011; Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2008). The current results support previous claims that link protracted development and incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013). Tentatively, this study concludes that under reduced input conditions, 2L1 develop core aspects of their language, such as accusative and dative structures, but cannot acquire language-specific properties, such as the acquisition of the [person] feature needed for DOM in Spanish.

Keywords: DOM, early bilinguals, objects, incomplete acquisition, input, interface
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Differential Object Marking in Spanish
  • 3.DOM and Language Acquisition
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Current study
    • 5.1Current study: Design
    • 5.2Current Study: Coding
    • 5.3Case study results
      • 5.3.1Tina
      • 5.3.2Carla
      • 5.3.3Leo
      • 5.3.4Simon
      • 5.3.5RIC
      • 5.3.6Yasmin
      • 5.3.7M
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 May 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.5.1.03tic
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