Chapter 10
Comprehension of Differential Object Marking by Hindi heritage
speakers
Archna Bhatia | Florida Institute for Human and Machine
Cognition
We investigated the comprehension of Differential Object Marking
(DOM) in Hindi heritage speakers who are second generation immigrants in the
United States. In Hindi, DOM is marked with the postposition
-ko, which is also a marker of dative case with
indirect objects. Studies of Hindi heritage speakers have found omission of
-ko with animate, specific direct objects in oral
production and that speakers find omitted –ko acceptable in
the same contexts in judgment tasks. The present study assessed whether the
vulnerability of DOM in heritage grammars is also measurable at the level of
auditory and written comprehension. In addition, we investigate whether
accuracy with the comprehension of DOM relates to quantity and quality of
input by controlling for age of onset of bilingualism. Thirty-eight young
adult heritage speakers, 23 adult immigrants from India, and 43 Hindi
speakers in India (all Hindi-English bilinguals) completed an off-line
written/auditory sentence comprehension task with pictures. The results show
that Hindi speakers from India and the Hindi immigrants performed largely at
ceiling, whereas some heritage speakers had difficulty with DOM in
comprehension.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Differential Object Marking in Hindi
- 3.The study
- Participants
- Task
- Results
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
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Acknowledgments
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Notes
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References