She is playing with my car: an investigation of possessive structures in Norwegian-Italian simultaneous bilinguals

This study investigates possessive pronoun placement in Norwegian-Italian bilingual children, focusing on the potential effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and the impact of heritage language status. Both Norwegian and Italian allow prenominal and postnominal possessives, but their contextual distributions are inverse across the two languages. Twenty-four bilingual children residing in Norway completed an elicitation task in both languages designed to elicit neutral and contrastive contexts. The results show that while the children produced both possessive variants in Norwegian, their Italian responses were overwhelmingly prenominal. This suggests a simplification of the Italian heritage grammar, consistent with patterns observed in other heritage languages. Regarding CLI, a non-significant trend was observed: children who spoke only Italian in the home produced more prenominal possessives in contrastive contexts in Norwegian. This pattern points to a possible influence of Italian on Norwegian, particularly among children exposed only to Italian at home.