Guest speaker: Begoña Arechabaleta-Regulez (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign)

OISE and the UTM Department of Language Studies are co-hosting a talk by Begoña Arechabaleta-Regulez, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She works on L2 learning, especially when it comes to Spanish. Her talk, "The production, comprehension, and processing of Spanish Differential Object Marking by bilingual speakers", will be taking place in Victoria College room 304 at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, March 19.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the production, comprehension and processing of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM) by bilingual speakers living in the U.S. Previous studies have reported that heritage speakers and L2 learners show DOM retraction with animate objects, as in (1 (Montrul and Bowles 2009; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker 2013). Transfer from their dominant language, English, seems to be the main factor causing the retraction of DOM. However, no previous study has compared these two groups to each other, and while previous studies have examined production, comprehension and processing of DOM in isolation, few, if any, have compared all three of these aspects with the same group of speakers. Therefore, more research is needed to better understand whether DOM retraction is characteristic of all types of bilingual speakers living in the US, visible in their processing, comprehension and processing, or whether DOM omission depends on the type of speaker and type of task. If DOM retraction happens to be the norm, this study would suggest that it is a new feature of Spanish in the U.S.

(1) Standard Spanish:
Juan saludó a María
‘Juan said hi DOM Maria’

Spanish in the U.S.:
Juan saludó María
‘Juan said hi Maria’

Results revealed that both heritage speakers and adult L2 learners showed less DOM retraction than expected. Moreover, DOM retraction depended on the type of task but not on the type of bilingual: heritage speakers and adult L2 learners both showed more DOM retraction in their oral production than in their comprehension or processing. Heritage speakers and adult L2 learners showed sensitivity to the omission of DOM with animate objects and judged sentences with DOM omission as ungrammatical. However, they omitted DOM in their production. These results suggest that first, there is an asymmetry between bilinguals’ comprehension/processing and production, as DOM retraction is mostly represented in production but not in comprehension or processing; and second, DOM retraction is less prevalent than previously thought in the Spanish of the U.S.