The present study explores how 12- and 15-year-old immersion students (n=75 and n=73) produce subordinate questions in Swedish on a written test. Previous studies are sparse, but they report difficulties with both subject-verb word order and use of the subjunctor om and the subject marker som occurring in these clauses; informants with varying ages and competence levels struggle with similar problems. However, the acquisition order between these two types of constructions, a central theme in this study, has gained less attention. Analyses of the actual data show significant differences with varying effect sizes in accuracy between the different subcategories of subordinate questions and both informant groups. Insertion of grammatical words was mastered by significantly fewer informants than word order. Also, effect sizes were large in these contexts. Older informants do better than the younger ones, but the differences are not always statistically significant, as certain constructions are already mastered at a high level by the younger informants, whereas other constructions are still difficult for the older ones.

There are two primary goals for this study – first, to analyse definiteness and article use in spontaneous writing in Swedish by 15-year-old Finnish immersion students (n = 162) and secondly, to compare their performance with that of non-immersion students at the same age (n = 67). Analyses at the group level show that immersion students usually perform significantly better than the control group, but they also reveal similar problems to what L2-Swedish non-immersion students have demonstrated in previous studies, such as omission of indefinite articles and difficulty in choosing the right definite form of the noun. Still, these inaccuracies occurred less often in the data from the immersion students. The studied constructions also show at the group level an acquisition order similar to that reported in previous studies, explainable by different aspects of complexity and cross-linguistic influence. Analyses on the individual level, however, show different acquisition orders depending on the criteria being used.

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Swedish grammatical gender is challenging for Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish due to its abstract meaning, the complex nature of Swedish NPs and the low salience of the morphology used to mark gender. Our study compares the expression of gender in texts written in Swedish by Finnish-speaking 12- and 15-year-old immersion students with that of 16-year-old non-immersion students. The results show that NPs with gender agreement, i.e. those with several morphemes marking gender, are more difficult than NPs with only one marker. In all informant groups, uter is significantly easier than neuter, but uter is also overused, as approximately 75% of all Swedish nouns are uter in modern Swedish. Comparisons between different informant groups show that non-immersion students often reach a significantly higher level of accuracy than immersion students, which indicates that formal teaching has a positive effect.

The aim of this article is to study the extent to which some of the most complex types of Swedish noun phrases (NPs) have been mastered in a grammaticality judgement test in L2 Swedish of Finnish-speaking 16-year-old non-immersion pupils (n = 44) compared with 15-year-old immersion pupils (n = 86). The study concentrates on double definiteness, NPs with both possessive/genitive and adjective attributes, and NPs with the synonymous demonstrative pronouns den här and denna ("this"). In previous studies, these NPs have been difficult for L2 learners irrespective of their L1, including immersion students. The studied NP types represent two types of complexity: formal complexity and complexity of the relationship between form and meaning. The research questions concern the order in which the studied forms are mastered, the hierarchy of difficulty for the different types of complexity, and the differences between non-immersion and immersion students. Analyses at the individual level show that formally complex NPs are used accurately more often than those with a complex relationship between form and meaning in both groups. This result is similar to the one achieved in a previous study with the same test with 12-and 15-year-old immersion students as informants. The differences between non-immersion and immersion students are small and usually statistically insignificant, i.e., the studied structures were difficult for the informants irrespective of the learning context.