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The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking
Edited by Alexandru Mardale and Silvina Montrul
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 26] 2020
► pp. 133–160

Chapter 5
The distribution of Differential Object Marking in L1 and L2 River Plate Spanish

| Wake Forest University
| Indiana University
This study examines Differential Object Marking (DOM) in native and largely naturalistic near-native L2 River Plate Spanish speakers (L1 Persian). Persian and Spanish mark certain direct objects (DO). Most syntactic descriptions of Spanish claim [+animate,+specific] DOs are marked while in Persian, all specific DOs are marked regardless of animacy. Native (n = 23) and L2 speakers (n = 8) completed a Grammaticality Judgment Task with correction (n = 48 experimental tokens) manipulating animacy and specificity with marked and unmarked DOs. Individual level results show divergence from conventional syntactic descriptions, and some native speakers also produced corrected sentences traditionally considered ungrammatical in Spanish (e.g. DOM with inanimate DOs). Since the L2 speakers did not indiscriminately accept all specific marked DOs, L1 transfer alone cannot explain their results.
Keywords: Differential Object Marking, Spanish, Persian, naturalistic, second language acquisition
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The syntax of Spanish and Persian DOM
  • Dialectal differences in Spanish DOM
    • Acquisition task
  • Previous literature
  • Methodology
    • Research questions and predictions
    • Participants
    • Experimental task
  • Results
    • Analysis 1: Acceptability rates
    • Analysis 2: Production via accepted/corrected items
    • Analysis 3: Individual data
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.26.05jud
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