Affiliation:
1. The University of Texas at San Antonio
Abstract
Abstract
Naturalistic production research has reported that, unlike monolingual peers, children acquiring Spanish as a
heritage language omit Differential Object Marking (DOM) with animate objects since the earliest stages of language development.
However, the previous studies investigating longitudinal monolingual and bilingual corpora cannot be compared to each other given
their different treatment of language-internal variation in DOM use along the animacy scale. Whereas monolingual results excluded
contexts predicted to be variable, bilingual results combined them with categorical contexts increasing the rate of “errors” in
the bilingual group. This study reexamines naturalistic production by monolingual and early bilingual children as well as by their
caregivers using a common methodology that distinguishes categorical from variable DOM contexts. The results indicate that
longitudinal corpora covering child heritage speakers’ development up to age three do not show evidence of greater omission of DOM
compared to monolingual children once variability along the animacy scale is accounted for. By contrast, young monolingual and
bilingual children’s use of Spanish DOM seems target-like based on their input.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
6 articles.
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