The acquisition of differential object marking in Spanish and Romanian: Semantic scales or semantic features?

This study investigates the acquisition of differential object marking in Spanish and Romanian. Both languages differentially mark those direct objects which are higher on the animacy and the specificity scales. The main aim is to identify whether the acquisition route strictly follows these semantic scales or whether it is merely guided by the underlying semantic feature of each scale. The analysis of three longitudinal corpora of spontaneous speech for each language (age range: Spanish: 1;1-3;1; Romanian: 1;9-3;1) reveals that the acquisition process of differential object marking builds on the core semantic features underlying the relevant scales, which correspond to semantic universals constraining the acquisition process.