This article examines whether the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in the English second language acquisition of a Russian-speaking child. It is demonstrated that, contrary to the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis, acquisition patterns cannot be attributed to “defective” tense, nor do they mirror the spell-out of aspectual features. A new approach is developed that proposes underspecification of the syntactic aspectual head in early second language child grammar.