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Pablo Irizarri van Suchtelen
or at least enough to acquire them normally. The “low input” group, however,
had limited exposure to Spanish and competition with Dutch right from birth,
which might have impeded their normal acquisition of clitics.
In that respect, the “low input” group resembles the type of subjects labeled
overhearers by Terry Kit-fong Au et al. (2002). They repeatedly found that
people who “passively” acquired Spanish during childhood through overhearing
their parents, without really speaking it much, had a benefit later in life acquiring
their heritage language in an L2-classroom setting, but only in the domain
of phonology (Au et al., 2008; Knightly et al., 2003). Their knowledge of Spanish
morphosyntax was similar to that of those who had not had any early exposure
to Spanish. Montrul (2010), rightly arguing that Au et al.’s measure of
morphosyntax was too coarse, provided counterevidence: “low proficiency”
heritage speakers did show an advantage over L2-learners. She argued that the
heritage speakers’ knowledge of clitics was more target-like overall. However,
in the same study, precisely dative clitic use did not seem at all target-like: in
a story-telling task, the 24 low proficiency heritage speakers realized 51,3% of
dative clitics in indirect object contexts, against 24 native speakers’ 92%
(Montrul, 2010: 181). Nevertheless, she does not address this result at all.
We have seen contrasting evidence in the literature regarding clitic use for
prototypical datives: on the one hand Silva-Corvalán (1994) and Montrul (2004)
showed it to be robust and target-like (recall section 2.2), and on the other hand
Montrul (2010) who provides evidence for it to be non-target like. However,
they may well all be right, if we assume that the difference lies in acquisition
history. In Montrul’s (2010) subjects, who were (assumably) comparable to Au
et al.’s “overhearers”, insufficient exposure led to considerable instability in the
use of dative clitics. The instability in my “low input” group corroborates these
results. Silva-Corvalán (1994) and Montrul (2004) do not provide detailed accounts
of the acquisition history of the subjects, but they did include higher
proficiency heritage speakers. Their “stable” results may be comparable to those
of my “high input” G2.
Whether the observed shifts in preferences are due to cross-linguistic influence
and/or some “universal” process of contact-induced change, is hard to tell
on the basis of these data (and not an aim of this study). It is true that Dutch has
no equivalent of clitic indexing, and that the “low input” group move away
from it and prefer marking with “a”, which is similar to Dutch “aan” (to). If we
simply assume convergence to Dutch to be responsible, however, it poses
a problem why the “low input” group do not use pronouns when referring to
Recipients, only full NP’s (Table 2). Choosing a strategy of “a + pronoun”
(“?Da un libro a ella” ‘He gives a book to her’) would be highly marked in
Spanish, and moreover, in Dutch too (“Hij geeft een boek aan haar” ‘He gives
a book to her’). The less marked alternative in both languages would be to pro-