Cross-linguistic influence in the processing of possessive agreement in L3/Ln Norwegian: Offline and online measures

Understanding how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) operates in multilingual comprehension is central to theories of grammatical representation, yet it remains unclear whether influence from the first language (L1) and second language (L2) is engaged uniformly across different processing contexts. This study addresses this question by examining how multilingual speakers process and evaluate possessive pronouns in Norwegian, a language that encodes both possessor and possessum agreement. Five groups of Ln learners of Norwegian ( N = 236; L1 English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish, with English as L2) and a control group of L1 Norwegian speakers ( N = 44) completed a self-paced reading task and an acceptability judgment task. The reading task revealed systematic L1-based CLI: English and Dutch speakers were more sensitive to possessor agreement violations, Spanish and Italian speakers showed greater sensitivity to possessum agreement, aligning with their respective L1 systems. Turkish speakers – whose L1 lacks grammatical gender – displayed reduced sensitivity overall. In contrast, judgment data showed both facilitative and non-facilitative CLI from L2 English, with higher proficiency associated with increased sensitivity to non-local agreement but reduced sensitivity in the local domain. We show that the source of CLI is task-dependent: online comprehension (examined through a self-paced reading task) primarily reflects implicit, L1-based grammatical knowledge, whereas offline acceptability judgments recruit more controlled, proficiency-mediated L2 knowledge. This distinction provides new evidence that multilingual grammatical representations are differentially accessed depending on processing demands, refining current accounts of CLI by integrating methodological sensitivity into models of multilingual language processing.