The Acquisition of Verb Placement in German: A New Look

Abstract

After an overview of the V2 phenomenon and the explanations which have been given for it in theoretical linguistics, the developmental data and different accounts for them are discussed pointing out various problems. Based on findings from experiments with 2 to 6 years old children using the head turn preference paradigm and a sentence repetition task a new approach is proposed arguing for a very early access to the critical parametric information, and explaining the developmental facts as resulting from the interaction of grammatical and processing constraints.