Marta Velnic

Marta Velnic is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She is an active member of both the AcqVA and ForMAAL research groups at NTNU and maintains ongoing collaborations with UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic influence in bilingual acquisition, particularly examining possessive structures in Norwegian-Italian bilingual populations and genericity in second and third language acquisition.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Linguistics from UiT the Arctic University of Norway (2018), an MA in Linguistics (2012), and a BA in Anthropology (2008), all from the University of Bologna. Her doctoral research investigated ditransitive structures in Croatian language acquisition, examining how animacy and givenness influence word order choices in children's language.

Velnic's research interests span Language Acquisition, Cross-Linguistic Influence, Bilingualism, Pragmatics, Possessives, Ditransitive Structures, Givenness, Animacy, Referring Expressions, Adjectives, and Genericity. Her work demonstrates particular expertise in comparative studies between Norwegian, Italian, Croatian, and Polish languages.

Analysis of her recent publications (2024-2025) reveals a strong research trajectory focused on genericity across language acquisition contexts, with particular emphasis on how multilingual speakers process and acquire generic expressions in L2 English and L3 Norwegian. Her work frequently employs experimental methodologies including reaction time studies and corpus analysis.

She has received research funding through projects including ADIM (funded by the National Science Centre in Poland), which ended in April 2024 but continues through data analysis supported by the MultiBridge grant.

Velnic has taught Language Acquisition courses at the BA level and has provided guidance to PhD students on writing introductory chapters (Kappe) for article-based dissertations. She developed the Double Object Database (DODB) for her PhD research, which catalogs 1,141 occurrences of ditransitive constructions in Croatian with detailed coding of syntactic, semantic, and discourse features.