The acquisition of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish by Italian university students

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish is realized through the insertion of the preposition a before [+animate] and [+specific] objects. So far, no study has investigated the use of DOM in Spanish by Italian speakers, and this is the aim of this study. Standard Italian, as well as the Northern Italian varieties, do not use DOM, whereas the distribution of DOM in Central-Southern varieties is practically identical to that of Spanish. For this reason, we questioned whether the knowledge of a Central-Southern Italian variety could facilitate the Italian learners in the acquisition of Spanish as an L3 and help them acquire the distribution of DOM in Spanish. 60 Italian university students and 30 monolingual Spanish native speakers participated in this study. Italian learners were divided into four groups, according to their geographical region of birth (Northern and Central-Southern Italy) and Spanish proficiency level (Intermediate and Advanced). Following Westergaard’s Linguistic Proximity Model (2019), the prediction is that proficiency-matched Central-Southern learners will significantly be more accurate in the use of DOM with respect to the Northern participants. To test these hypotheses, the participants completed a grammaticality judgment task and an oral elicited production task of DOM. The results did not confirm the prediction, suggesting that the effects of the knowledge of a local variety cannot be perceived at intermediate and advanced stages of L3 acquisition.