Abstract
This paper examines the emergence and acquisition of marked accusative objects (Differential Object Marking, DOM, Bossong, 1991) in the spontaneous production of seven early Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth, 2L1) with different linguistic environments. The main finding is that the 2L1 group examined did not acquire differentially marked objects in the period studied, up to 3:6, nor did they behave similarly to Spanish monolingual children (L1) acquiring DOM (Montrul, 2011; Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2008). The current results support previous claims that link protracted development and incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013). Tentatively, this study concludes that under reduced input conditions, 2L1 develop core aspects of their language, such as accusative and dative structures, but cannot acquire language-specific properties, such as the acquisition of the [person] feature needed for DOM in Spanish.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 62-90 |
Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism |
Volume | 5 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- DOM
- Early bilinguals
- Incomplete acquisition
- Input
- Interface
- Objects
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language