As indicated by its title, this book describes the acquisition of verb placement in German by four elementary-aged children whose first language is either Turkish or Russian. This work presents longitudinal data from an age group often neglected in language acquisition research and, as such, will be of particular interest to linguists and psycholinguists who work in the areas of both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition. Throughout the book Haberzettl stresses the descriptive nature of her study, stating: “die empirischen Beobachtungen sind das Fundament für die Genierung von Hypothesen, nicht für eine Hypothesenüberprüfung” (p. 2). This bottom-up approach is important, not only because of the limited amount of previous research conducted with this type of population, but also because it results in a book rich with empirical data from her subjects. Even though there are certain problems with how Haberzettl chooses to frame her work in relation to previous L2 acquisition research, this book represents a valuable contribution to language acquisition research, due to the nature of Haberzettl's subject population and because of her presentation and discussion of the data.

After a brief introductory chapter, Haberzettl devotes chapter 2 to a summary and discussion of three different explanatory models of language acquisition, namely acquisition within the framework of generative syntax and Universal Grammar (henceforth UG) (such as Flynn and Martohardjono 1998), functional approaches to language acquisition (such as Klein and Perdue 1992; Slobin 1973, 1985), and processing-oriented theories of language acquisition (such as Pienemann 1998). Haberzettl provides a good summary of many of the major findings from both L1 and L2 acquisition research, although one could argue that she devotes a disproportionate amount of time to discussing UG-based approaches, leaving less space for functional and processing-oriented accounts.

Chapter 3 provides readers with an overview of German word order. Haberzettl offers readers both a surface explanation of German word order, as well as a summary of German sentence structure within a generative framework. She argues, and correctly so, that while she presents her data in a purely descriptive format, because many German L2 acquisition studies have been conducted within a generative framework (for example, Schwartz and Sprouse 1994; Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1994), it is important to present an overview of this analysis of German sentence structure as well.

Chapter 4 provides a detailed description of the data collected by Haberzettl. The data from her four subjects, two Turkish and two Russian children who moved to Germany shortly before starting elementary school, come from a larger longitudinal study conducted from 1989 to 1992 with immigrant children in Augsburg. The children in the study were between six and eight years old at the beginning of the study and had varying degrees of contact with German native speakers. Haberzettl analyzes subjects' responses obtained during a free speech activity at one-month intervals over the course of the study, with respect to the development of verb placement rules in German. For each subject, Haberzettl provides numerous tables and speech examples detailing his or her progression.

In the first half of chapter 5, Haberzettl discusses the results of the descriptive analyses presented in chapter 4. In spite of individual differences among the four subjects, there are clear trends in the data reflecting the properties of the subjects' L1. The Turkish children quickly “discover” the right verbal bracket in German, producing SXVfin sentences, and they have little or no trouble with modal and perfect constructions, or with dependent clause constructions as soon as they start including such constructions in their utterances. Through the use of ist ‘is’ as a sort of dummy auxiliary, the Turkish children also quickly learn to produce SVfinX sentences, although it takes them longer to correctly produce true verb-second constructions involving inversion.

In contrast, the two Russian children produce SVfinX constructions from the earliest recorded stages, but their acquisition of the right verbal bracket progresses much more gradually. Similar to the Turkish children, it also takes the Russian children a relatively long time to correctly produce true verb-second constructions involving inversion. Important to her discussion of these findings compared to previous research, Haberzettl also reports no correlation between the development of verbal inflection and verb-second among her subjects, regardless of their L1.

Based on these findings, Haberzettl argues that transfer from the L1, when supported by evidence from L2 German input, can best explain these subjects' acquisition of German verb placement rules. The two Turkish children acquire the right verbal bracket early on because German verb-final input matches the SOV pattern in their native language. At the same time, the high degree of German verb-second input—especially with regards to the ist-copula, which does not exist in Turkish—highlights clear structural differences between Turkish and German. These differences are salient to the Turkish children early on, thus forcing them to quickly incorporate a left verbal bracket into their German interlanguage.

By contrast, the two Russian children only gradually begin to exhibit correct verb placement in modal and perfect constructions, as well as in dependent clause constructions, because they incorrectly assume, based on German main clause input, that German is an SVO language similar to their native Russian. Since this is only a surface similarity between Russian and German, the combination of German L2 input and the resulting transfer of L1 Russian structures leads the Russian children down the garden path, making it more difficult for them to develop the crucial right verbal bracket in German.

As previously stated, Haberzettl's presentation of the data in chapter 4 and her interpretation of the data in the first portion of chapter 5 are the real strengths of this book. In contrast, the weakest section of this book is the second half of chapter 5, in which she discusses her findings in light of several theories of adult L2 acquisition, namely the UG-based Minimal Trees Hypothesis (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1991, 1994), the UG-based Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994), and Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998). Haberzettl argues that the results of her study pose problems for all three of these models. What Haberzettl does not acknowledge in her discussion, however, is that all three of these theories are based on adult L2 acquisition, whereas her subjects are in early elementary school. Therefore, it is entirely possible that her findings are not compatible with these explanatory models of L2 acquisition because of fundamental differences in how adults and children learn languages.

In conclusion, this work is important both for its subject matter and the empirical data it presents. Haberzettl's study examining early elementary-aged children learning German as a second language helps fill an important gap in L1 and L2 acquisition research (see Wegener 1992, 1995 for other research on this population). With the exception of Chomsky's (1969) seminal study tracing the syntactic development of complex structures in American elementary school children, most L1 acquisition research stops at around age five. Similarly, L2 acquisition research focuses largely on child bilingualism, adult L2 acquisition, or classroom immersion learning. Haberzettl faces a difficult challenge when trying to situate her study in relation to previous research, given that there are few studies in the body of previous L1 and L2 acquisition research with which her findings are truly comparable. Therefore, in spite of my criticism of her final chapter, this book is a needed and valuable addition to the research literature on L1 and L2 acquisition.