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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. 183–206

Chapter 7
Animacy hierarchy effects on L2 processing of Differential Object Marking

| Rutgers University
| Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
| University of Illinois at Chicago

Studies on L2 processing of Differential Object Marking (DOM) are scant and mostly focus on the animacy of the object. We investigated the interaction of three understudied factors in L1 and L2 processing of DOM: type of animacy (human vs. non-human animal), gender and number of the object (masculine vs. feminine, plural vs. singular), and morphological salience of the DOM marker (e.g., al bound/less salient vs. a unbound/more salient). Forty-three Spanish monolinguals and 81 English learners of Spanish (39 intermediate, 42 advanced) completed a self-paced reading task with subject relative clauses (RCs) containing DPs with singular and plural human or animal direct object nouns. Results showed that L2 learners’ sensitivity to animacy hierarchy differences is possible in cognitively easy conditions (unbound DOM, masculine gender). These findings inform current L2 representational and processing models, and stress the value of examining multiple factors to fully understand the complexity of DOM.

Keywords: Spanish DOM, relative clauses, animacy hierarchy, L2 learners, proficiency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The linguistic phenomena: DOM and RCs in Spanish
  • 3.Literature review
    • 3.1Production and offline studies of DOM in L2 Spanish
    • 3.2Online studies of DOM in L2 Spanish
  • 4.The study
  • 5.Methods
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Materials and procedure
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Results with singular RC objects (al vs. a la)
    • 6.2Results with plural RC objects (a los vs. a las)
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Animacy hierarchy effects
    • 7.2Salience effects
    • 7.3Gender effects
    • 7.4L2 proficiency effects
  • 8.Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.26.07sag
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