The acquisition of clitic dative doubling in heritage speakers and L2 Spanish

This study investigates the production of dative clitic doubling among Spanish heritage speakers and English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. Dative clitic doubling, a grammatical structure in Spanish, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Montrul, 1998; Cuervo, 2007; Escobar-Alvarez, 2017). The study examines the extent to which heritage speakers of Spanish and L2 learners demonstrate knowledge of dative clitic doubling in Spanish with ditransitive verbs across four conditions: psych verbs, wh-questions, double object constructions, and inalienable possession. The results from an online Elicited Production Task reveal that L2 learners exhibit crosslinguistic influence from their L1, characterized by the omission of the dative clitic in the analyzed structures. Heritage speakers also show some degree of crosslinguistic influence, often preferring prepositional constructions over dative clitic doubling. The findings are discussed in the context of the current discourse on the roles of proficiency, language use, and exposure.