Language separation and stable syntactic knowledge: verbs and verb phrases in bilingual children’s narratives

The present study analyses written narratives of 60 Portuguese-German bilingual children between 8 and 15 years living in Switzerland, both their languages. Portuguese is the children’s heritage language (HL) German environmental language. analysis focusses on lexical, morphological structural knowledge verb domain (verb types, agreement morphology, verbal tense, word order within VP, orthography) aims to determine role dominance, general proficiency, current age onset bilingualism (AoO) acquisition at later stages development (i.e., school-age). results show that display stable syntactic Lexical positively correlated with proficiency. Morphological deviations are residual languages not AoO. No effects cross-linguistic influence observed. We only find performance differences corpus level orthography. conclude analysed span have received enough exposure develop knowledge, least domain.