Differential Object Marking in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian Heritage Speakers

该奖项根据 2009 年《美国复苏和再投资法案》（公法 111-5）提供资金。 传统发言者是指从小就听甚至讲非英语语言但现在更习惯使用英语的成年人。最近对传统说话者的研究记录了屈折形态和句法方面的不完整习得。该项目将遗产语言作为语言系统本身及其伴随的不完全习得模式进行研究。解决的研究问题是：1）母语者完整语法的哪些具体方面在不完全习得的情况下受到系统性影响；2）哪些语言内部和语言外部因素导致特定语法特征的脆弱性？该项目研究了差异对象标记（DOM）领域的这些问题：一些直接对象的明显形态标记。先前的结果表明，西班牙语传统使用者的 DOM 和与格标记非常脆弱。这项研究将研究西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语传统使用者的 DOM。选择这三种语言是因为 DOM 标记的显着性不同：它是西班牙语中的声乐介词 (a)、罗马尼亚语中的音节介词 (pe) 以及印地语中的音节后置词 (-ko)。该项目将测试以下假设：物体标记的声学显着性有助于其在这些遗产语言中的侵蚀或保留。实验数据将从完全掌握该语言的母语人士以及在美国出生或童年移民到美国的传统母语人士中收集。将使用广泛的语言背景调查问卷以及口语/书面表达、理解和语法判断任务。该研究是第一个对不同传统语言的 DOM 习得进行理论指导的大规模调查之一，也是第一个针对印地语和罗马尼亚传统语言使用者的研究。由于实验设计包括大量以西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语为母语的人，因此结果也将补充到 DOM 的现有研究。这项研究将影响西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语语言学以及一般语言理论。更重要的是，它将对双语环境中的第一语言习得和语言维持/丧失产生理论影响。它将揭示早期双语习得的范围作为年龄和语言环境的函数。它将提供有关第二语言习得年龄如何影响传统语言使用者的语言能力的信息。最重要的是，通过确定遗产使用者从小就保留的内容、哪些传记因素有助于语言维持，以及他们知识中潜在的语言差距，结果将为遗产语言的教学提供信息。遗产语言教学是一个新领域，迫切需要扎实的基础研究成果来构建良好的教学材料。

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.