Article published in:
Representation and Processing in Bilingual Morphology
Edited by Jennifer R. Austin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1] 2019
► pp. 120–160

Processing DOM in relative clauses

Salience and optionality in early and late bilinguals

| Rutgers University
| Rutgers University
| Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Early heritage bilinguals have been repeatedly found to differ from late bilinguals and from monolinguals (e.g., Montrul, 2008, 2011). In the realm of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), both early heritage bilinguals (Montrul et al., 2015) and late bilinguals (e.g., Bowles & Montrul, 2008; Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012) exhibit difficulties. DOM in a complex structure such as relative clauses (RCs) provides an ideal setting to differentiate early from late bilinguals, but it has only been explored offline (Perpiñán & Moreno-Villar, 2013). This study fills this gap by examining the role of word order (SVO, OSV, OVS), optionality (obligatory vs. optional contexts), and saliency (bound vs. unbound morphology) on the processing of DOM in embedded RCs in Spanish, by Spanish monolinguals, and advanced early heritage and late bilinguals of Spanish. The results of a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task revealed that all participants were more accurate but were slower in subject than object RCs, and in OSV than OVS RCs. Slower RTs in subject RCs were due to the presence of DOM, and in OSV to interpreting OVS as SVO. Also, all participants were both more accurate as well as faster in obligatory than optional DOM, unbound than bound morphology, and masculine than feminine RC NPs. These findings reveal that processing difficulties in RCs result from the interaction of word order and DOM, and that processing DOM depends on both salience and, to a lesser extent, gender. Finally, this study shows that early heritage bilinguals are closer to monolinguals than late bilinguals in terms of morphosyntactic processing patterns.
Keywords: DOM, relative clauses, heritage speakers, age of acquisition
Published online: 31 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16020.sag
References

References

Aissen, J.
(2003) Differential Object marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21, 435–83. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Antón-Méndez, M. I.
(1999) Gender and Number Agreement Processing in Spanish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Beck, S.
(1998) NP dependent readings of different, Proceedings of the Eighth Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (SALT 8), Cornell University. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M.
(2013) Defining an “ideal” heritage speaker: Theoretical and methodological challenges Reply to peer commentaries. Theoretical linguistics, 39(3–4), 259–294.Google Scholar
Betancort, M., Carreiras, M., & Sturt, P.
(2009) The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(10), 1915–1929. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bleam, T.
(2005) The role of semantic type in differential object marking. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 19(1), 3–27.Google Scholar
Bonnet, G.
(2002) The assessment of pupils’ skills in English in eight European countries. Paris, European Network of policy makers for the evaluation of education systems.Google Scholar
Bornkessel, I., & Schlesewsky, M.
(2006) The extended argument dependency model: a neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychological Review, 113(4), 787. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bossong, G.
(1991) Differential object marking in Romance and beyond. New analyses in Romance linguistics, 143–170. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bowles, M., & Montrul, S.
(2008) The role of explicit instruction in the L2 acquisition of the a-personal. Proceedings of the 2006 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 25–35.Google Scholar
Carreiras, M., Duñabeitia, J. A., Vergara, M., de la Cruz-Pavía, I., & Laka, I.
(2010) Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process: Evidence from Basque. Cognition, 115(1), 79–92. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cuza, A., Pérez-Leroux, A. T., & Sánchez, L.
(2013) The role of semantic transfer in clitic drop among simultaneous and sequential Chinese-Spanish bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(01), 93–125. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cuza, A., Pérez-Tattam, R., Barajas, E., Miller, L., & Sadowski, C.
(2013) The development of tense and aspect morphology in child and adult heritage speakers. Innovative Research and Practices in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, 38, 193–220. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
del Río, D., López-Higes, R., & Martín-Aragoneses, M. T.
(2012) Canonical word order and interference-based integration costs during sentence comprehension: The case of Spanish subject-and object-relative clauses. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(11), 2108–2128. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eberhard, K. M.
(1997) The marked effect of number on subject-verb agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 147–164. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Farley, A., & McCollam, K.
(2004) Learner Readiness and L2 Production in Spanish: Processability Theory on Trial. Estudios de linguistica aplicada, 40, 47–69.Google Scholar
Ferreira, F., & Clifton, C.
(1986) The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language 25, 348–368. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Franceschina, F.
(2001) Morphological or syntactic deficits in near – native speakers? An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17, 213–247. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E.
(1998) Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68(1), 1–76. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goldschneider, J. M., & DeKeyser, R. M.
(2001) Explaining the “Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition” in English: A Meta-analysis of Multiple Determinants. Language Learning, 51(1), 1–50. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Guijarro-Fuentes, P.
(2011) Feature composition in differential object marking. EuroSLA Yearbook, 11(1), 138–164. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2012) The acquisition of interpretable features in L2 Spanish: Personal a. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 15(04), 701–720. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Guijarro-Fuentes, P. & Marinis
(2007) Acquiring interface phenomena in L2 Spanish: the personal preposition a. In L. Robertgs, A. Guerel, S. Tatar, & L. Marti (Eds.), Eurosla Yearbook, 7. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 67–88.Google Scholar
Guijarro-Fuentes, P. & Marinis, T.
(2011) Voicing language dominance: the acquisition of the Spanish by British English/Spanish bilingual children. In K. Potowski & J. Rothman (Eds.), Bilingual Youth. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 227–248. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Bravo, R.
(2005) Subject inversion in Spanish relative clauses. In T. Geerts, I. Ginneken & H. Jacobs (Eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2003. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins. Crossref pp.150–166.Google Scholar
Harris, J.
(1991) The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27–62.Google Scholar
Havik, E., Roberts, L., Van Hout, R., Schreuder, R., & Haverkort, M.
(2009) Processing subject-object Ambiguities in the l2: a self-paced reading study with German L2 learners of Dutch. Language Learning, 59(1), 73–112. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, R.
(1998) Explaining the difficulty of French gender attribution for speakers of English. Paper presented at the 8th annual EUROSLA conference, Paris.
Hawkins, R. & Franceschina, F.
(2004) Explaining the acquisition and non-acquisition of determiner-noun gender concord in French and Spanish. Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 32, 175–206. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heese, H. W.
(1997) Counterbalancing and other uses of repeated-measures Latin-Square designs: Interpretations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64, 137–158. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H.
(2010) Ultimate attainment in L2 inflectional morphology: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua, 120, 901–931. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2014) Working memory effects in the L2 processing of ambiguous relative clauses, Language Acquisition, 21(3), 250–278. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E. L., & Comrie, B.
(1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8 (1), 63–99.Google Scholar
Leonetti, M.
(2004) Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3, 75–114.Google Scholar
(2008) Specificity in Clitic doubling and in Differential Object marking. Probus, 20(1), 33–66. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Levy, R.
(2008) Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106(3), 1126–1177. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, R. L., & Vasishth, S.
(2005) An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science, 29(3), 375–419. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H.
(2002) Reassessing working memory: comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109(1), 66–74. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B., & Pleh, C.
(1988) The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition, 29(2), 95–141. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Martoccio, A.
(2012) The acquisition of differential object marking in L2 Spanish learners (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).Google Scholar
McCarthy, C.
(2008) Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research, 24, 459–486. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2002) Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5.39–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2004) Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(02), 125–142. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2009) Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 239–269. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2010) How similar are adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers? Spanish clitics and word order. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31(01), 167–207. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2011) Morphological errors in Spanish second language learners and heritage speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33.155–61. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2014) Structural changes in Spanish in the United States: Differential object marking in Spanish heritage speakers across generations. Lingua 151. 177–96. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016) The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Bhatt, R. & Bhatia, A.
(2012) Erosion of case and agreement in Hindi heritage speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2.141–76. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Bhatt, R., & Girju, R.
(2015) Differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian as heritage languages. Language, 91(3), 564–610. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Bowles, M.
(2009) Back to basics: Differential object marking under incomplete acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12.363–83. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S.
(2008) Gender agreement in adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition. Language Learning 58.3–53. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Sánchez-Walker, N.
(2013) Incomplete acquisition of differential object marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition 20.109–32. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O'Grady, W., Lee, M., & Choo, M.
(2003) A subject-object asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses in Korean as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25(03), 433–448. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J.
(2012) The (Ill)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33, 1–7. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Perpiñán, S.
(2015) L2 Grammar and L2 Processing in the Acquisition of Spanish Prepositional Relative Clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(04), 577–596. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Perpiñán, S. & Moreno Villamar, I.
(2013) Inversion and Case Assignment in the Language of Spanish Heritage Speakers. Proceedings of the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.Google Scholar
Pires, A., & Rothman, J.
(2009) Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 211–238. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Polinsky, M.
(2008a) Without aspect. Case and grammatical relations, 263–282. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2008b) Gender under incomplete acquisition: Heritage speakers’ knowledge of noun categorization. Heritage Language Journal, 6(1), 40–71.Google Scholar
(2011) Reanalysis in adult heritage language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(02), 305–328. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O.
(2007) Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, M. & Sánchez, L.
(2013) What's so incomplete about incomplete acquisition? A prolegomenon to modeling heritage language grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3(4), 476–506. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, J.
(2007) Heritage speaker competence differences, language change, and input type: Inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(4), 359–389. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sánchez-Walker, Noelia, and Silvina Montrul
(2016) Comprehension of subject and object relative clauses by second language learners of Spanish. In Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Elena Valenzuela, and Cristina Martínez Sanz (Eds.), Language Acquisition Beyond Parameters: Studies in honour of Juana M. Liceras, 149–185. Amsterdam: John Benjamins CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Slabakova, R.
(2013) What is easy and what is hard in second language acquisition: A generative perspective. In María del Pilar García Mayo, M. Junkal Gutierrez-Mangado & María Martínez Adrián (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, 5–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Torrego, E.
(1998) The dependencies of objects. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
(2002) Aspect in the prepositional system of Romance. In Teresa Satterfield, Christina Tortora and Diana Cresti (Eds.), Current Issues in Romance Languages, 337–357. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J., & Tanenhaus, M.
(1994) Toward a lexical framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. Perspectives on sentence processing, 155–179.Google Scholar
Valdés, G.
(2000) Introduction. Spanish for native speakers, vol. 1. (AATSP) professional development series handbook for teachers K-16.) New York: Harcourt College.Google Scholar
VanPatten, B.
(1996) Input processing and grammar instruction in second language acquisition. Greenwood Publishing Group.Google Scholar
von Heusinger, K., & Kaiser, G.
(2005) The evolution of differential object marking in Spanish. In Klaus von Heusinger, Georg A. Kaiser and Elisabeth Stark (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop “Specificity and the Evolution / Emergence of Nominal Determination Systems in Romance”. 33–69. Universität Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. A.
(1997) WAIS-III, WMS-III technical manual. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Zobl, H., & Liceras, J.
(1994) Functional categories and acquisition orders. Language Learning, 44(1), 159–180. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Austin, Jennifer
2019. Representation and processing in bilingual morphology. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo
Jiao, Jian, Alejandro Cuza & Julio César López Otero
2020.  In Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 27], ► pp. 233 ff. Crossref logo
Reifegerste, Jana
2021. The effects of aging on bilingual language: What changes, what doesn't, and why. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 24:1 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 05 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.