The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

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This study focuses on the acquisition of verbal mood in complement clauses by two groups of heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) (7–16 years old) with similar sociolinguistic profiles and two different dominant languages, German and French. The production of finite complement clauses was elicited through a sentence completion task. By comparing two bilingual groups with different dominant languages (a Romance language with a subjunctive mood encoding the same semantic values as EP and a Germanic language with no similar linguistic category), we discuss the relative weight of cross-linguistic influence and of amount of exposure in bilingual acquisition. The results show protracted development of both bilingual groups concerning the subjunctive, with no negative effect observed in the bilingual speakers who are dominant in German. We conclude that cross-linguistic influence cannot explain this performance and suggest that amount of input plays a role.