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The early bird gets the worm thats the mantra the 5-a.m. The results presented in this dissertation are not only relevant to second language researchers, but also to neurolinguists, psycholinguists and all late second language learners who want or need to reach an extremely high level of proficiency in the target language. This year, shoppers are going with the age-old adage, the early bird gets the worm. The use of these tasks and constructions and the important role for the typological distance between languages make the design of this study truly unique. A good friend Ikhram Merican who calls himself a Properneur and writes at this famous blog: posted in his instagram this quote of ‘early bird gets the worm. I’m in my bathrobe, but it’s my pretty one and I changed out of my pajamas to wear it mostly because I was stepping into the shower when I realized I hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet this morning, and I have shower-taking standards, namely doing. We know the famous saying, ‘early bird gets the worm.’ It meant if we like to be the first to get the reward, we need to be the first to do it successfully. In this study, a sentence preference task and an imitation task were used to test highly proficient German, French and Turkish late learners of Dutch on their command of dummy subject constructions, for which no explicitly formulated rules are available. Someone who is very active and alert in the early hours of the morning is apt to find success. The Late Bird Gets Worms, Too It’s 10:00 AM, and I just watched a late bird catch a worm. In this dissertation, this question is investigated for the area of syntax and related to the typological distance between native and target languages. The huge variation in ultimate attainment in many late learner groups in earlier studies, has recently evoked an interest in the question of whether there are individual late learners who manage to achieve a native level of proficiency in a second language. According to this hypothesis, a high level of proficiency should not be attainable for late learners due to a biologically determined decrease in sensitivity to language input after puberty. This difference has inspired researchers in different fields for decades and has lead to the formulation of the Critical Period Hypothesis for second language acquisition. In general, the difference in proficiency between child and adult learners of a second language is remarkable.