Seventh Heritage Language Research Institute

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A new dialectal feature? Tracing the roots of the “Incomplete Acquisition” of differential object marking in Spanish heritage speakers

In Montrul (2002, 2004, and 2008) and subsequent work, I have claimed that a great deal of the linguistic patterns exhibited by Spanish heritage speakers in a variety of linguistic domains could be primarily due to incomplete acquisition due to reduced input in childhood. But critical questions also arise as to whether many of the strutural changes observed in heritage speakers are shaped by the particular characteristics of the heritage language, the linguistic practices in the community, and the quality of input they receive from their interlocutors. In this talk, I revisit my original position by showing that in some grammatical domains—most notably differential object marking (DOM)—transfer from English and language change in the primary input (i.e., attrition in the first generation) may also lead to what looks like “incomplete acquisition” in heritage speakers. I will discuss experimental results from child and adult heritage speakers and age and SES-matched native speakers in Mexico, first generation immigrants, bilingual children, and the mothers of some bilingual children. I show that what may look like the result of incomplete acquisition or attrition in childhood in the heritage speakers may be, in fact, acquisition of a stabilized feature in a new variety of Spanish, similar perhaps to what Sharma (2005) showed for the distribution of definite and indefinite articles in Indian English. I argue that extending research questions and methodologies from linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition has significantly enlightened our current understanding of heritage language acquisition, but a better understanding of the grammatical knowledge of heritage speakers and the changes observed across generations necessitates a more fruitful integration of psycho-, neuro- and socio-linguistics.