The earlier the better? Age of first language exposure matters

In the research paper „Age of Onset Effects in Child Bilingual Acquisition: Identifying the Turning Point”, which has been published in the international journal GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, Prof. Aldona Sopata and Dr. Kamil Długosz address the question of how age of first language exposure affects the development of grammatical competence in Polish-German bilingual children. Analysing children’s sentence repetition performance by means of ROC curves, the authors argue that the first three years of life are the optimal period for acquiring a language. Does that mean that children who start learning a language later in life are not able to achieve high linguistic competence? Absolutely not! However, they will often differ from children exposed to a language earlier in life, particularly with respect to some very subtle aspects of language.