On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage speakers’ production and selection of differential object marking (DOM). A total of 57 English–Spanish bilingual children and 18 Spanish-dominant adults completed sentence completion and morphology selection tasks. Results revealed that the group of heritage speaker children that produced and selected the differential object marker most frequently was the seventh and eighth grade children (ages 12–14, the oldest in the study) who had completed a dual-language immersion program. Different factors accounted for variability in each task: bilingual education and proficiency affected the production of DOM, while age affected selection. Heritage speakers selected DOM more frequently than they produced this structure. These findings have implications for theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasizes that language experience and exposure account for differences between heritage speakers and argue for the dissociation of production from underlying syntactic knowledge. The data also argue that heritage speakers may possess a bilingual alignment for DOM, whereby underlying receptive knowledge is modulated by cumulative exposure, while production depends more on bilingual education and proficiency in Spanish.