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"Spanish Object Expression under Incomplete Acquisition in Adult Bilingualism"

Silvina Montrul

Dr. Silvina Montrul

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Linguistics, and FLARE are co-sponsoring the visit of Dr. Silvina Montrul from The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She will give us a public lecture entitled 'Spanish Object Expression under Incomplete Acuisition in Adult Bilingualism' on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 401S PBB.

Abstract of the Talk

In this talk, she addresses the morphosyntactic development of two types of adult bilinguals with low-intermediate proficiency in Spanish (i.e., incomplete learners) L2 learners and heritage speakers who differ with respect of age of onset of acquisition of Spanish. Heritage speakers received input at home in early childhood whereas L2 learners start acquisition after puberty. Comparison of the linguistic behavior of these two types of learners is crucial to inform classic and ongoing debates in SLA theory on the one hand, as well as the emerging field of heritage language acquisition, on the other. I will discuss results of ongoing experiments on three aspects of object expression in Spanish (object clitic placement, clitic left dislocations, and differential object marking), which show selective advantages for heritage speakers.