Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Spanish Heritage Speakers

Abstract

We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6–17) from the United States and 20 monolingual children from Mexico completed a Story Retelling Task and a Picture Description Task. In study 2, 64 young adult heritage speakers (ages 18–25), 23 adult immigrants to the United States (ages 40–60), and 40 native speakers from Mexico (ages 18–60) completed the same oral tasks. Results showed significant rates of omission of DOM in animate direct objects in all the experimental groups from the United States and ceiling performance in the groups from Mexico (both children and adults). We discuss how the combined effects of reduced input, potential attrition in the first generation of immigrants, incomplete acquisition in the second generation, and transfer from English may account for the persistent patterns of DOM omission with animate and specific direct objects in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number BCS-0917593, ARRA. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We are grateful to all the participants in the study, as well as to Kirsten Hope and Laura Romani, who helped with data collection and transcriptions. We thank Maria Polinsky for insightful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. We also thank Tania Ionin and the anonymous reviewers who evaluated our manuscript for their useful feedback.

Notes

¹We first developed the task for the adults and then we piloted it with children. After the pilot with 4- and 6-year-olds we made the task more child-friendly by adding children's characters and changing some verbs.

²A reviewer suggests that an ideal control group for heritage speakers would be balanced bilinguals. In our view, balanced bilinguals would also be heritage speakers with very high proficiency in Spanish if raised since childhood in the United States speaking a minority language. Because we were focusing on age of onset of bilingualism as a variable in language attrition, it was more pertinent for the purposes of our study to consider individuals with a late age of immigration and individuals who have not immigrated and are not living in a bilingual situation as baseline groups. In fact, many of the heritage speakers tested in this study showed very high proficiency in Spanish and could actually be considered balanced bilinguals if we had assessed their two languages.

³We are currently testing another group of bilingual children (n = 14), similar to the ones tested in Study 1, and their mothers. The sample so far also includes two 4-year-olds. These young children show about 80% accuracy on DOM in both tasks, while the two 7-year-olds and one of the 6-years-olds tested show an accuracy rate below 20%. It is likely that DOM is not fully mastered by age 4 and subsequently suffers attrition when children start school in English.