Acquiring Persian Object Marking : Balochi learners of L2 Persian

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of Persian object marking by 237 nativeBalochi-speaking children from age eight to eleven. The combination of Balochi and Persian has not beenstudied from an acquisitional perspective, although it widely occurs in southeastern Iran. This paperstudies the second language (L2) development of direct and indirect object marking after two and threeyears of exposure to Persian at school, vs. a control group of 133 monolingual native Persian children ofsimilar age and socio-economic background. Beginning learners predominantly use non-targetlike objectmarking constructions reminiscent of Balochi, whilst there is a clear trend towards Persian-style objectmarking in the more advanced learners. These findings suggest that L2 learners initially transfer core aspectsof their native grammar to their interlanguage Persian. The picture is complicated by the existenceof differential object marking in Balochi and Persian and the somewhat different writing patterns of nativeand non-native learners