Differential object marking in Spanish-English early bilinguals

This paper examines the emergence and acquisition of marked accusative objects (Differential Object Marking, DOM, Bossong, 1991) in the spontaneous production of seven early Spanish-English simultaneous bilinguals (henceforth, 2L1) with different linguistic environments. The main finding is that the 2L1 group examined did not acquire differentially marked objects in the period studied, up to 3;6, nor did they behave similarly to Spanish monolingual children (L1) acquiring DOM (Montrul, 2011; Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2008). The current results support previous claims that link protracted development and incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013). Tentatively, this study concludes that under reduced input conditions, 2L1 develop core aspects of their language, such as accusative and dative structures, but cannot acquire language-specific properties, such as the acquisition of the [person] feature needed for DOM in Spanish.