The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008(Slabakova, , 2013 proposes that acquiring properties of the functional morphology is the most challenging part of learning a second language. In the experiment presented here, the predictions of this hypothesis are tested in the L2 English of Norwegian native speakers. Two constructions are investigated that do not match in English and Norwegian: One involving functional morphology, Subject-Verb (SV) agreement, which is obligatory in the L2 but non-existent in the L1, and one involving syntax, Verb-Second (V2) word order, which is obligatory in the L1, but restricted to specific contexts in the L2. The results of an acceptability judgement task indicate that the participants struggled more with identifying ungrammatical SV agreement than ungrammatical word order. We conclude that the findings lend tentative support to the Bottleneck Hypothesis.

This study investigates possessives and modified definite DPs in a corpus of heritage Norwegian spoken in the US. Both constructions involve variation in Norwegian – two word orders for possessives (pre- and postnominal) and two exponents of definiteness (a prenominal determiner and a suffix) – while English only has one of these options. The findings show that a large majority of the heritage speakers overuse the structures that are maximally different from English structures, i.e., postnominal possessors and single suffixal definiteness marking. We argue that their production pattern is the result of cross-linguistic overcorrection (CLO). In addition, a small group of the heritage speakers show signs of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and overuse the English-like structures in both constructions. These speakers also have a slightly lower proficiency in the heritage language. Our findings are discussed in terms of previous research on monolingual and Norwegian–English bilingual children.

In this article, we present the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD), with a focus on the rationale behind it, the methods used in data elicitation, data analysis and the empirical scope of the database. NWD is an online database with a user-friendly search interface, hosted by The Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo, launched in April 2019 (https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd). It contains elicited production data from speakers of all of the North Germanic languages, including several different dialects. So far, 7 fieldtrips have been conducted, and data from altogether around 250 participants (age 16–60) have been collected (approx. 55 000 sentences in total). The data elicitation is carried out through a carefully controlled production experiment that targets core syntactic phenomena that are known to show variation within and/or between the North Germanic languages, e.g., subject placement, object placement, particle placement and verb placement. In this article, we present the motivations and research questions behind the database, as well as a description of the experiment, the data collection procedure, and the structure of the database