Search

Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the ‘default’ and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children’s input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware of the existence of both subject positions, and if they prefer the more frequent or the less complex position. Through an elicited production task with monolingual Norwegian children (N=33, age 3;1-6;1) we find that children in general overuse the Neg-S option, and we suggest that children have an inherent preference for the less complex position, due to a principle of structural economy. We also find that a group of children display U-shaped development, first using only S-Neg, then only Neg-S and finally S-Neg again, and we relate this to structure building and economy of movement.

Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets.

This paper discusses possible attrition of verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations, but nevertheless finds approximately 10% V2 violations. The cases of non-V2 word order are argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language. This crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but is argued to operate more indirectly, affecting (a) the distribution of contexts for V2 word order, and (b) introducing two new distinctions into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in the dominant language (a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement), the other based on frequency of initial elements triggering V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules.

I would first of all like to thank the many authors who have provided commentaries on my keynote article ‘Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition’ (Westergaard, 2021a). The keynote has generated significant and stimulating debate about central issues on crosslinguistic influence in multilingual language acquisition, and I find it especially welcome that the majority of the commentaries support and enhance the main idea of the keynote, viz. that L2/L3/Ln acquisition takes place as a step-wise process, property by property. The commentaries have provided supporting arguments, additional data, and suggestions for further research, but also new questions and critical comments. This response is divided into sections focusing on the following issues: Full transfer and the notion of copying, the definition of linguistic proximity, some terminological issues, research methodology, predictions, empirical support, and possible misinterpretations. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as feminine agreement forms (for example, the indefinite article) are merged with the masculine. The definite suffix, in contrast, is quite stable, as it is acquired early and does not undergo attrition/change. We argue that the combined data provide evidence that gender and declension class are separate phenomena, and we outline a possible formal analysis to account for the findings.*

This study investigates the acquisition of articles in L2 English by L1 speakers of Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in Ghana. Dagbani differs from English in that it has two definite articles, no indefinite article, and a zero-article which may express definiteness, indefiniteness as well as genericity. The study consisted of a Forced-choice task (FCT) and an Acceptability judgement task (AJT) which were administered to Dagbani teenagers with an intermediate proficiency in English (n = 45) and a group of native English speakers as controls (n = 8). The results showed that the learners’ article choice was based on definiteness, not specificity (i.e., no fluctuation between the two) and that they had slightly more problems with indefinite than definite contexts, while generic contexts were the most problematic. Except for a certain task effect as well as a possible interference of instruction (in the FCT), the results can be argued to generally be due to influence from the L1 and to the difficulty of feature reassembly.

Bringing together lines of research from sentence processing and lexical access, this empirical study investigates the interplay between lexical (grammatical gender) and syntactic (word order) cross-linguistic overlap in L2 German. Eighty-six L1 Spanish-L2 German and thirty-six monolingual German adults completed a German self-paced reading task with noun phrases (NPs) manipulated by L1-L2 gender congruency (congruent, incongruent, neuter) and L1-L2 adjective-noun word order (pre- vs. postnominal adjectives). The study examines the effects of gender congruency, the type of L1-L2 gender mapping (i.e., presence vs. absence of each class in L1 and L2), and L2 proficiency level. Results show that the detection of ungrammatical word order in L2 German interacts with gender congruency, in that L2 speakers are only sensitive to word order violations for sentences with gender-congruent nouns. The detection of ungrammaticality for sentences containing gender-incongruent nouns only emerges at higher L2 proficiency levels. These findings underscore the role of cross-linguistic lexical overlap in syntactic processing.

In most studies on gender processing, native speakers of the same language are treated as a homogeneous group. The current study investigates to what extent an ongoing change in the gender system of Norwegian (a development from three to two genders, involving the loss of feminine) may be reflected in processing. We carried out a gender decision task in which speakers were presented with 32 nouns of each gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and asked to select the corresponding indefinite article. Based on these results, we identified three different groups: three-gender speakers, two-gender speakers, and an unstable gender use group that used feminine gender to varying degrees. This division corresponded with clear differences in RTs, the two-gender speakers being faster overall with no difference across conditions, the three-gender group being slower with masculine, and the unstable group being slower with both masculine and feminine. Thus, our results indicate that native speakers of the same language can in fact have different underlying representations of gender in the lexicon.

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an artificial L3 and preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at the very beginning of the acquisition process. We exposed four groups of 30 Norwegian–English bilinguals each to one of four L3s and gave them training in that L3. The participants gave forced-choice acceptability judgments on pairs of nonsubject-initial declarative clauses that differed in word order, one grammatical in English, the other grammatical in Norwegian. The participants had not been exposed to nonsubject-initial declaratives during the exposure and training phases to avoid confounds with learning. The results showed that both lexical and syntactic similarities affect crosslinguistic influence. We discuss this result considering contemporary accounts of L3 acquisition.

Aims and objectives: This empirical study investigates variables affecting crosslinguistic influence (CLI) in child third language (L3) acquisition. We examine whether structural or typological similarity leads to CLI from one or both of the previously acquired languages at later stages of acquisition. Design/methodology: We compare Russian-German heritage bilinguals acquiring L3 English to L2 English learners with either L1 German or L1 Russian (matched in age, proficiency, age of onset, length of exposure), which allows us to assess whether CLI obtains from one language or both. We carried out an acceptability judgment task: Two of the structures under investigation in English are structurally similar to German (subject-auxiliary inversion, determiner use) and two to Russian (adverb placement, non-subject-initial declaratives). Data and analysis: We tested 10- to 12-year-old L3 learners ( n = 66), L2 learners with L1 Russian ( n = 26), and L1 German ( n = 33). The L3 learners were tested in both previously acquired languages. Findings/conclusions: Our findings suggest that structural proximity may override typological similarity at later stages and indicate that CLI obtains cumulatively from both languages. We found facilitative and non-facilitative CLI from Russian and German. For properties that are structurally similar in English and Russian, the L3 learners outperformed the L2 learners with L1 German and were outperformed by the L2 learners with L1 Russian, and vice versa for properties similar in English and German. Originality: Our research adds child L3 data to the current debate on whether morpho-syntactic properties from previously acquired languages are transferred wholesale or property by property, based on typological primacy or linguistic proximity. Significance: Previous research has shown that surface typological similarity is an important factor at early stages of acquisition. Our study investigates whether structural similarity can override this strong factor at later stages of child L3 acquisition.

Aims and objectives: This article investigates naturalistic acquisition of a second dialect (D2), comparing the global accent of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exposed to European Portuguese (EP), either as children or as adults (early vs late bilectals). The focus is on the predicted advantage of an early age of onset of the D2, as well as possible crosslinguistic influence from the D2 onto the first dialect (D1). Design and methodology: The study is an Accent Rating Task, where 50 raters judged the global accent of 30 BP speakers living in Portugal (15 early + 15 late bilectals), who were recorded in both BP and EP modes. Using a 6-point Likert-type scale, the raters judged whether the speakers sounded Brazilian or Portuguese and also indicated how certain they were about their judgment. Data and analysis: The data consisted of two 10-second audio snippets from each speaker, one in BP and the other in EP mode (altogether 60 items). In addition, there were 10 control items produced by native BP and EP speakers. Several mixed-effects models compared the target groups to each other and to the monolectal controls. Findings and conclusions: Both the early and late bilectals were rated as Brazilian in BP mode, but the degree of rater certainty was significantly lower for early than for late bilectals, which was again lower than for BP monolectals. In EP mode, early bilectals were perceived as Portuguese (though the raters were less certain than when rating EP monolectals), while late bilectals were judged as Brazilian. Originality: The study adds to the novel but increasing body of research on speakers of two closely related varieties. Significance and implications: This research illustrates that bilectalism displays a number of similarities with bilingualism, specifically that there may be significant effects of age of onset of the D2.

Accepted manuscript. Final version published in Second Language Research, is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319884116. In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on crosslinguistic influence in L2/Ln acquisition, I first briefly outline the Micro-cue Model of L1 acquisition (Westergaard, 2009a, 2014), arguing that children build their I-language grammars incrementally, paying attention to small distinctions in syntax and information structure from early on. They are also shown to be conservative learners, generally not producing overt elements or performing movement operations unless there is positive evidence for this in the input, thus minimizing the need for unlearning. I then ask the question how this model fares with respect to multilingual situations, more specifically L2 and L3 acquisition. Discussing both theoretical and empirical evidence, I argue that, although L2 and L3 learners are different from L1 children in that they are not always conservative learners, they are also sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, in that transfer/crosslinguistic influence takes place on a property-by-property basis. Full Transfer is traditionally understood as wholesale transfer at the initial state of L2 acquisition. However, I argue that it is impossible to distinguish between wholesale and property-by-property transfer in L2 acquisition on empirical grounds. In L3 acquisition, on the other hand, crosslinguistic influence from both previously acquired languages would provide support for property-by-property transfer. I discuss a few such cases and argue for what I call Full Transfer Potential (FTP), rather than Full (wholesale) Transfer, within the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) of L3 acquisition. Thus, rather than assuming that ‘everything does transfer’, I argue that ‘anything may transfer’.

Accepted manuscript. Final version published in in Second Language Research, is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319882061.

Cournane (this volume) argues that child language acquisition is not only responsible for innovation in language change processes but that young learners are also responsible for the incrementation of the change in a language community. She sketches an inverted U-shaped model of incrementation (p. 143), where children’s initial overgeneralization of a linguistic phenomenon (input-divergence) is followed by a drop in production of the overgeneralized form (due to children’s sensitivity to adult input), which is again followed by an increase in production in late childhood and adolescence (possibly caused by input from other children).

This is a commentary article in response to the following content: The Full Transfer/Full Access model and L3 cognitive states. Please contact the John Benjamins Publishing Co. for re-use. In Schwartz and Sprouse’s keynote “The Full Transfer/Full Access model and L3 cognitive states” (henceforth S&S), the authors discuss the concept of Full Transfer from their own work on L2 acquisition in the 1990s in relation to new developments in L3/Ln acquisition. They claim that Full Transfer must be understood as Wholesale Transfer (WT) and argue against what they refer to as Piecemeal Transfer (PT). In their definition of WT as “transfer of a substantial part of or even all of the abstract properties of one of the previously acquired grammars as a block” (p. 2), they seem to introduce a new concept of “substantial parts” as different from the whole grammar, but unfortunately they do not elaborate on the nature and size of such parts. Towards the end of the paper, they sketch some interesting avenues for L3 research involving different language combinations, but the ongoing work referred to has not yet provided any evidence that may distinguish between WT and PT.

In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence (CLI) at developmental stages of third language (L3) acquisition of English by Russian–Norwegian children (N = 31). We tested seven linguistic properties within three linguistic modules (morphology, syntax and syntax-semantics). We compared the L3 learners to Norwegian (N = 90) and Russian (N = 74) second language (L2) learners of English. We predicted simultaneous facilitative and non-facilitative CLI in the L3 group within all modules, as the previously acquired languages offered conflicting options. Our predictions were partly supported. On one property, the L3 learners were different from both L2 groups, which is in line with cumulative CLI from both previously acquired languages. On four conditions, the L3 learners performed like the more accurate L2 group, indicating facilitative influence. On two conditions, all groups performed alike, showing high rates of accuracy. Taken together, the results indicate that CLI obtains on a property-by-property basis, with none of the L1s being the sole or primary source of CLI. Finally, we found CLI in all linguistic domains, but the developmental slopes for the properties were not equal, which suggests that factors such as complexity and saliency needs to be taken into account when we compare CLI.

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

One of the most contentious topics in cognitive science concerns the impact of bilingualism on cognitive functions and neural resources. Research on executive functions has shown that bilinguals often perform better than monolinguals in tasks that require monitoring and inhibiting automatic responses. The robustness of this effect is a matter of an ongoing debate, with both sides approaching bilingual cognition mainly through measuring abilities that fall outside the core domain of language processing. However, the mental juggling that bilinguals perform daily involves language. This study takes a novel path to bilingual cognition by comparing the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals in a timed task that features a special category of stimulus, which has the peculiar ability to manipulate the cognitive parser into treating it as well-formed while it is not: grammatical illusions. The results reveal that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in detecting illusions, but they are also slower across the board in judging the stimuli, illusory or not. We capture this trade-off by proposing the Plurilingual Adaptive Trade-off Hypothesis (PATH), according to which the adaptation of bilinguals’ cognitive abilities may (i) decrease fallibility to illusions by means of recruiting sharpened top-down control processes, but (ii) this is part of a larger bundle of effects, not all of which are necessarily advantageous. Copyright: © 2021 Leivada et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008, 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 second language (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 first language (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 is the accepted manuscript version of a book chapter that is under copyright. For re-use of the material in any form the publisher should be contacted. Source at https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.59. This study investigates two word order phenomena in Norwegian heritage language spoken in the US, subject shift (SS) and object shift (OS). SS and OS occur in syntactic environments where (pronominal) subjects and objects may either precede or follow negation. This paper explores to what extent these two phenomena in Heritage Norwegian are affected by the factors frequency and structural similarity/difference. As subjects are frequently shifted, while objects are not, SS is expected to be robust and OS vulnerable. There is generally no structural overlap between English and Norwegian in these cases; thus, cross-linguistic similarity or difference should not play a role, except in one context: questions with auxiliaries or be, in which the two languages allow both orders (is he not/isn’t he ), but have opposite preferences. The results show that OS is somewhat vulnerable, but SS is also affected, in that both proficient and less proficient speakers seem to overuse the word order preferred in English. We thus speculate that all heritage speakers may be affected by cross-linguistic influence in situations with complete structural overlap.

Accepted manuscript version. Published version available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000016. This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly produce locative utterances lacking overt prepositions, with the rate of preposition omission decreasing significantly by age 3. Furthermore, our results suggest that phonologically strong and semantically unambiguous locative items appear earlier in Norwegian children's utterances than their phonologically weak and semantically ambiguous counterparts. This conclusion is confirmed by a corpus study. We argue that our results are best captured by the Underspecified P Hypothesis (UPH; Mitrofanova, 2017), which assumes that, at early stages of grammatical development, the underlying structure of locative utterances is underspecified, with more complex functional representations emerging gradually based on the input. This approach predicts that the rate of acquisition in the domain of locative PPs should be influenced by the lexical properties of individual language-specific grammatical elements (such as frequency, morphological complexity, phonological salience, or semantic ambiguity). Our data from child Norwegian show that this prediction is borne out. Specifically, the results of our study suggest that phonologically more salient and semantically unambiguous items are mastered earlier than their ambiguous and phonologically less salient counterparts, despite the higher frequency of the latter in the input (Clahsen et al., 1996).

This chapter provides an overview of the micro-variation in Norwegian when it comes to Verb Second (V2) word order, both in the various dialects and in the two standard written varieties of Norwegian. The variation is dependent on a number of factors, including clause type, type of initial element, and information structure. This overview demonstrates a rich inventory of micro-systems, raising the question of how children come to acquire such fine-grained patterns. The chapter addresses this question by providing findings from acquisition research and discusses what this considerable micro-variation and coexisting grammars tell us about the architecture of the human language faculty.

Heritage grammars have been argued to differ with respect to whether they are an instantiation of divergent attainment or attrition. Attrition and divergent attainment are not mutually exclusive and can even co-exist with respect to the same or different grammatical phenomena, but teasing these apart requires longitudinal studies or carefully selected cross-sectional data (Montrul, 2008; 2016; Polinsky, 2011). In this article we present data from a longitudinal corpus of letters written by a speaker of North American Icelandic over a span of seventy-two years. The earliest letters suggest that the writer acquired Icelandic consistent with the baseline. However, in the last thirty years of writing, non-target forms emerge in the corpus. Morphosyntax, notably grammatical gender and inflectional morphology, is the most affected domain of grammar. In this article we focus on the nature of the changes attested for grammatical gender across time. Our results show that gender assignment does not undergo a systematic re-analysis. However, the non-target gender agreement indicates the overuse of an agreement default, which may reflect a trend towards a systematic reduction of the gender agreement system.

This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi‐directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition—not exclusively but indeed especially from heritage language bilingualism—provide windows into the tenability of formal linguistic proposals. As a result, acquisition evidence—both developmental and in ultimate attainment—should be welcomed by all formal theorists, as they can confirm or disconfirm otherwise seemingly unverifiable theoretical arguments. Our claims will be illustrated by three research areas: language change, differences between functional and lexical features, and the interplay between core syntax and other components of the grammar. © 2019 The Authors. Language and Linguistics Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, adding evidence from other lesser studied domains, such as definiteness and phonology. We propose that in addition to the linguistic make-up of the phenomena in question, the size of the heritage community and, relatedly, opportunities to use the language need to be taken into account. The latter may explain, for example, why moribund varieties of German and the Scandinavian languages in North America appear to be less stable than the language of second-generation heritage speakers in Europe.

Numerous studies have argued that bilingualism has effects on cognitive functions. Recently, in light of increasingly mixed empirical results, this claim has been challenged. One might ponder if there is enough evidence to justify a cessation to future research on the topic or, alternatively, how the field could proceed to better understand the phantom-like appearance of bilingual effects. Herein, we attempt to frame this appearance at the crossroads of several factors such as the heterogeneity of the term ‘bilingual’, sample size effects, task effects, and the complex dynamics between an early publication bias that favours positive results and the subsequent Proteus phenomenon. We conclude that any definitive claim on the topic is premature and that research must continue, albeit in a modified way. To this effect, we offer a path forward for future multi-lab work that should provide clearer answers to whether bilingualism has neurocognitive effects, and if so, under what conditions. Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Source at https://ojs.novus.no/index.php/MOM/article/view/1898. Trondheims-dialekten har tradisjonelt tre grammatiske kjønn: hankjønn, hunkjønn, og intetkjønn. Denne artikkelen presenterer resultater fra to eksperimenter som viser at hunkjønn står svakere i denne dialekten enn tidligere antatt. Resultatene tyder på at dialekten er i ferd med å utvikle et togenussystem, der den ubestemte artikkelen for hunkjønn og hankjønn har falt sammen. Vi ser tydelige forskjeller mellom de fem ulike aldersgruppene som har deltatt i studien, som overraskende nok viser at den ubestemte artikkelen i hunkjønn står relativt svakt også blant voksne. I motsetning til de ubestemte artiklene endrer ikke bestemthetssuffiksene seg like mye, og vi diskuterer hva dette forteller oss om genus versus bøyningsklasse. Slike endringer er dokumentert flere steder i Norge de siste årene (Lødrup 2011, Conzett, Johansen & Sollid 2011, Westergaard & Rodina 2016), og vi diskuterer mulige forklaringer på denne utviklingen.