Age of onset does not matter for bilingual children’s understanding of late-acquired phenomena

Abstract The Timing Hypothesis predicts that age of onset and L2 input in bilingual acquisition interact with timing in monolingual acquisition: early-acquired phenomena, mastered before age four by monolingual children, are subject to age of onset effects, whereas late-acquired phenomena, mastered after age four by monolinguals, are not affected by age of onset but by L2 input. The current study evaluates the prediction regarding late-acquired phenomena in the area of sentential semantics by examining how bilingual children understand sentences with temporal connectives in their L2 as a function of age of onset and length of L2 exposure. A group of six- to twelve-year-old children with L1 Greek and L2 German, varying widely in age of onset and length of L2 exposure, was tested on their comprehension of sentences with the connectives before and after in iconic and non-iconic order, using a picture-sequence selection task. Baseline data from monolingual German-speaking children showed that temporal connectives are a late-acquired phenomenon, still not mastered by age seven. Bilingual children’s L2 performance was not influenced by age of onset, despite its wide range, but by length of L2 exposure. This finding provides novel support for the Timing Hypothesis from temporal semantics.