El aprendizaje del MDO en la clase de ELE. El caso de los hablantes del italiano regional de Sicilia

This paper displays an analysis of the acquisition of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish by students whose native language (L1) is the regional Italian spoken in Sicily. The study aims to identify the relationship between the students’ linguistic proficiency and their mastery of DOM. Using both qualitative and quantitative analyses, the factors that influence the activation of DOM are explored. The research is based on a corpus derived from written exams taken during final assessments in university-level Spanish language courses. The findings reveal both the progress made and the challenges encountered in learning DOM in Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). Specifically, the results suggest that the influence of the students’ native language, as proposed by Hulk and Müller (2001), is limited in this process. Additionally, from a quantitative perspective, it is concluded that the semantic and pragmatic properties of the direct object—such as animacy, referentiality, and definiteness—are the primary factors affecting the accurate acquisition of this morphosyntactic feature.