Placement of infinitives in successive child language acquisition

In recent work on child second language acquisition (cL2) a number of different age ranges for the onset of this acquisition type have been proposed (Schwartz 2004; Meisel 2008; Nicholas & Lightbown 2008). This paper aims at showing at which age noticeable differences as compared to first language acquisition (L1) emerge in the placement of infinitives in German. The study is also concerned with the acquisition of subject verb agreement as a turning point in the developmental sequence of German. The data of the children studied are shown to be consistent with the hypothesis of Meisel (2008) assuming the onset of cL2 between the ages 3 and 4.