Divergence and avoidance in the production of DOM in Romanian and Spanish among Romanian-speaking L2 speakers of Spanish

This study investigates bidirectional crosslinguistic influence (BCLI) among L1 Romanian L2 Spanish speakers, focusing on differential object marking (DOM) in both languages. While Romanian and Spanish exhibit similar DOM systems, they vary in the factors influencing object marking. The research involved highly proficient Romanian-Spanish bilinguals, Spanish native speakers, and Romanian monolinguals, analyzing transitive structures in narratives. Results from a narrative task in both Spanish and Romanian suggest that Romanian-Spanish bilinguals employ different strategies than Romanian monolinguals in Romanian. Nevertheless, this group of bilinguals presents transitive strategies similar to those displayed by Spanish monolinguals in their Spanish narratives. In other words, bilinguals show reduced use of DOM in Romanian compared to their monolingual counterparts, but no differences compared to Spanish monolinguals, potentially indicating L1 attrition rather than BCLI. Additionally, the comparison between the findings presented in this study, gathered via narrative tasks, and the findings obtained from the same group of bilinguals with the help of more controlled production tasks and acceptability judgment tasks reveals that, in semi-spontaneous production, bilinguals tend to employ avoidance strategies, while, in controlled production tasks (i.e., EPT), they exhibit ungrammatical DOM usage in Romanian, possibly influenced by Spanish. Overall, this study sheds light on L1 attrition dynamics in Romanian-Spanish bilinguals, a less-explored language pair compared to other languages in contact with Spanish.