Case Marking in Hindi as the Weaker Language

Abstract

Does language dominance modulate knowledge of case marking in Hindi-speaking bilinguals? Hindi is a split ergative language with a rich morphological case system. Subjects of transitive perfective predicates are marked with ergative case (-ne). Human specific direct objects, indirect objects, and dative subjects are marked with the particle -ko. We compared knowledge of case marking in Hindi–English bilinguals with different dominance patterns: 23 balanced bilinguals and two groups of bilinguals with Hindi as their weaker language: 24 L2 learners of Hindi with age of acquisition (AoA) of Hindi in adulthood and 26 Hindi heritage speakers with AoA of Hindi since birth in oral production and acceptability judgments. The balanced bilinguals outperformed the English-dominant bilinguals; the L2 learners and the heritage speakers, who showed similar lower command of the Hindi case marking system, with the exception of -ko marking as a function of specificity with direct objects. We consider how dominant language transfer, AoA of Hindi, and input factors may explain the acquisition and knowledge of morphology in Hindi as the weaker language.

Attrition, addition, and age

“…At the same time, they also correctly accepted marked animate, specific objects. These patterns also obtained in language production, where some speakers omitted DOM to various degrees, producing both correctly marked objects and incorrectly unmarked objects (Montrul and Sánchez Walker, 2013; Montrul et al, 2019; Montrul and Bateman, in press).…”

Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children

“…What is especially remarkable in the context of HL acquisition is that aspects of language usually acquired early by monolingual children may show a protracted developmental pattern in child HSs. The acquisition of inflectional morphology, in particular, such as case marking, has been reported as problematic for adult HSs from a range of typologically different languages: from East-Asian languages that allow for case drop (e.g., Korean, Japanese; Kim, O'Grady, & Schwartz, 2017;Laleko & Polinsky, 2016), to Indo-European languages, where a default or a syncretic case is produced (e.g., Russian or German; Laleko & Polinsky, 2016;Montrul, Bhatia, Bhatt, & Puri, 2019). These issues have been shown to emerge in the speech of HL children (Flores, 2015;Janssen, 2017;Janssen, Meir, Baker, & Armon-lotem, 2014;Kim et al, 2017;Song, O'Grady, Cho, & Lee, 1997) 1 and to persist in adult HSs (see Montrul, 2015).…”

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/

“…Finally, for the categorical fixed effects, planned pairwise comparisons (Tukey tests) were conducted using the emmeans package ( Lenth, 2020 ) in R to shed light on the comparisons that we cannot see in the model, that is, in Tables 4 , 5 . This method has been used in the context of different kinds of regression analyses, such as logistic / ordinal regression (see Montrul et al, 2019 ; Kim and Yoon, 2020 ).…”