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We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6–17) from the United States and 20 monolingual children from Mexico completed a Story Retelling Task and a Picture Description Task. In study 2, 64 young adult heritage speakers (ages 18–25), 23 adult immigrants to the United States (ages 40–60), and 40 native speakers from Mexico (ages 18–60) completed the same oral tasks. Results showed significant rates of omission of DOM in animate direct objects in all the experimental groups from the United States and ceiling performance in the groups from Mexico (both children and adults). We discuss how the combined effects of reduced input, potential attrition in the first generation of immigrants, incomplete acquisition in the second generation, and transfer from English may account for the persistent patterns of DOM omission with animate and specific direct objects in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that investigates if Japanese and Korean children tend to use direct-object arguments with verbs that occur most frequently in a transitive frame in maternal speech. The researchers say that both Japanese and Korean languages allow the construction of sentences wherein transitive verbs occur without a visible direct object. They also point out that unlike in English language, discourse considerations are important to Japanese and Korean. It is assumed that at a young age Japanese and Korean children already know the character of missing direct object.