An Experimental Study of the L2 Acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking

In Spanish, some direct objects are preceded by the accusative case marker a, depending on semantic properties of the object, subject, and verb. This is an example of a phenomenon known as Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Bossong, 1985; Aissen, 2003). This paper presents a study of the acquisition of Spanish DOM by native English speakers who are advanced second-language (L2) learners of Spanish, in order to shed light on competing theories of L2 acquisition, in particular the Interpretability Hypothesis (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2008, 2009; Hwang & Lardiere, 2013). The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces Spanish DOM, and summarizes previous studies on its acquisition. Section 3 describes the methodology of the study. Section 4 discusses the Interpretability Hypothesis and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, and the predictions they make for the results of the study. Section 5 presents the results of the study, and discusses their implications for the theories of L2 acquisition under consideration. Section 6 concludes.