Abstract
In contemporary Romanian, differential object marking is undergoing a change from a system allowing two marking patterns in optional contexts to a system which preserves only one of these patterns. In the present study we verify if child heritage speakers opt for the novel system at a level beyond the one in the input. The data come from 34 narratives by 7- and 10-year-old heritage speakers of Romanian living in France, compared to 34 narratives by monolingual children living in the homeland, 11 adult first generation immigrants from France and 10 Romanian adults from Romania. The findings suggest that language change is not advanced in a heritage language acquisition scenario when the change is found in the weaker language and targets a phenomenon at the syntax-discourse interface.