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Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

A prominent question in research on childhood bilingualism is whether the age of onset of theL2 (AoO) influences the path, pace, and/or success of L2 and HL acquisition. Regarding L2acquisition, the timing hypothesis (Tsimpli 2014; Schulz & Grimm 2019) predicts an interaction between AoO and timing in monolingual acquisition, i.e. the age at which a phenomenonis mastered by monolingual children. Specifically, phenomena mastered early, before the ageof four, by monolingual children are expected to differentiate between child bilingual acquisition types (simultaneous bilinguals, early L2 learners, late child L2 learners), with an advantage for children exposed to their L2 at a younger age. In contrast, phenomena masteredlate or very late by monolingual children, after the ages of four and six, respectively, are notexpected to induce differences between bilingual acquisition types, when the amount of exposure to the L2 is controlled for; in other words, the acquisition of (very) late phenomenashould be sensitive to L2 input rather than AoO. The majority of empirical evidence from avariety of languages and phenomena is in line with this prediction.For HL acquisition, the hypothesis regarding the role of AoO is different: later exposureto the L2 should be beneficial for the development of HL abilities, especially for phenomenamastered late in monolingual acquisition (e.g., Kupisch 2019; Armon-Lotem et al. 2021). Thereason for this beneficial effect is that a later AoO represents a longer period of exclusive ex-posure to the HL in the early years and is usually associated with increased HL exposureacross the lifespan (Lloyd-Smith et al. 2020; Paradis 2023). The existing evidence generallyconfirms the positive influence of later AoO on HL development, but is inconclusive as towhether AoO effects are stronger for early or late HL phenomena.Notably, both strands of research on childhood bilingualism have focused primarily onthe domain of morphosyntax. The present study extends previous research, by investigatingthe role of AoO in the bilingual acquisition of a very late phenomenon from the domain ofsentential semantics, i.e. the comprehension of complex sentences containing temporal conjunctions.