Delayed acquisition may contribute to the difference in language competence between heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of the same language.[1] Late or delayed acquisition of a language can have "consequences for linguistic, neurological, and cognitive mechanisms" that work to make language acquisition "fast, effortless, and... successful".[2] Flores and Barbosa (2014) studied the clitic placement of heritage speakers of Portuguese living in Germany and concluded that the heritage speakers went through the same stages of acquisition as their monolingual counterparts.