PhD Project: Differential Object Marking in Romanian-Spanish Bilinguals. Studying bi-directional crosslinguistic influence in a multi-method approach.

Senta Zeugin joined the URPP Language and Space in  June 2024 as part of the Research Group for the final stage of her PhD journey. She pursued her dissertation project within the research group "Systems of Nominal Determination in Contact (SyNoDe)." Her research is part of the SNSF-funded project Experimentelle Morphosyntax romanischer Sprachen, led by Johannes Kabatek."

This PhD-project investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish and Romanian with a focus on Romanian-Spanish bilinguals in Madrid. DOM is a phenomenon found in many languages all over the world and in both Spanish (Veo a María vs. Veo la casa) and Romanian (O văd pe Maria vs. Văd casa). Still, the extension of DOM differs significantly in both languages, which makes it an interesting focus point for a study of bilinguals. The central research question revolves around whether bi-directional crosslinguistic influence (BCLI) can be found in the way the bilinguals process and produce DOM, i.e. is there Spanish influence when they use Romanian DOM and vice versa. Additionally, the impact of social factors such as age of acquisition or length of the stay in Spain are considered.
This investigation combines complementary methods for data collection. Primarily, experimental methods are employed to collect highly comparable data from the three groups of participants (bilingual group N=110, Spanish group N=67, Romanian group N=70). The experiments consisted of acceptability judgment tasks and semi-spontaneous elicited production tasks, each targeting contexts that revolve around the main parameters of DOM in both languages (animacy and referential stability), yet show divergent patterns (e.g. specificity in indefinite NPs, different animacy levels in definite NPs, unmodified definite NPs, or quantifiers). Since Spanish and Romanian DOM differs in these contexts, possible BCLI in the bilinguals may be most visible here. The participants from the bilingual group completed the experiments in both languages, while the other two groups took part only in their respective language. The experiments were complemented by socio- and metalinguistic interviews with the same participants, in which aspects of language acquisition, proficiency and daily use were covered, especially concerning the bilinguals. Also, information on their immigration experience and identification with both cultures was collected, in addition to the participants’ intuitions on some of the previously tested experimental items. This complementary approach allows targeting several areas of DOM via different experimental methods and contextualizing the experimental data, especially with information about the very diverse profiles of the bilingual speakers. Ultimately, the multi-method approach permits drawing a fuller picture of DOM in Spanish and Romanian in general and with Romanian-Spanish bilinguals in particular.