Chapter 6. On the acceptability of the Spanish DOM among Romanian-Spanish bilinguals

Abstract

Spanish and Romanian have Differential Object Marking (DOM) systems conditioned by similar but not the same features. This study examined whether Romanian-speaking highly proficient L2 users of Spanish show signs of crosslinguistic influence from Romanian in their acquisition of the distribution of DOM in Spanish. A group of Spanish-speaking monolinguals and a group of Romanian-Spanish bilinguals who acquired Spanish naturalistically completed an Acceptability Judgment Task that investigated their receptive grammatical knowledge of the DOM in Spanish and, for the bilinguals, Romanian. The results are discussed within the frame of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and the Activation Approach.