Differential Object Marking in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian Heritage Speakers

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Heritage speakers are adults who grew up hearing and even speaking a language other English but who are now more comfortable in English. Recent studies of heritage speakers have documented incomplete acquisition of aspects of inflectional morphology and syntax. This project investigates heritage languages as linguistic systems in their own right and their accompanying patterns of incomplete acquisition. The research questions addressed are 1) Which specific aspects of a native speaker's full grammar are systematically affected under incomplete acquisition and 2) What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical features? The project investigates these questions with respect to the domain of Differential Object Marking (DOM): the overt morphological marking of some direct objects. Previous results demonstrate the fragility of DOM and dative case marking in Spanish heritage speakers. This research will study DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian heritage speakers. These three languages were chosen because the salience of the DOM marker varies: it is a vocalic preposition in Spanish (a), a syllabic preposition in Romanian (pe), and a syllabic post-position in Hindi (-ko). The project will test the hypothesis that the acoustic salience of the object marker contributes to its erosion or retention in these heritage languages. Experimental data will be collected from native speakers with full command of the language, and heritage speakers of each language who were born in or immigrated to the United States in childhood. Extensive language background questionnaires and oral/written production, comprehension and grammaticality judgment tasks will be used. The study is one of the first theoretically informed large-scale investigations of the acquisition of DOM in different heritage languages, and the first study on Hindi and Romanian heritage speakers. Since the experimental design includes a sizable number of fluent native speakers of Spanish, Hindi and Romanian, the results will also add to existing studies of DOM.This research will impact Spanish, Hindi and Romanian linguistics, and linguistic theory in general. More centrally, it will have theoretical implications for first language acquisition and language maintenance/loss in bilingual settings. It will shed light on the range of early bilingual acquisition as a function of age and linguistic environment. It will provide information on how age of second language acquisition affects linguistic competence in heritage language speakers. Most importantly, by identifying what heritage speakers retain from childhood, what biographical factors contribute to language maintenance, as well as potential linguistic gaps in their knowledge, the results will inform the teaching of heritage languages. Heritage language instruction is a new field in urgent need of solid basic research findings from which to build sound pedagogical materials.