Children are sensitive to the default verb order in German subordinate clauses: evidence from ‘because’ clauses in spontaneous speech.

As one of the languages with generalized verb-second movement, German places the verb in verb-second position (referred to as V2) in declarative main clauses. In subordinate clauses the verb is placed in final position, i.e., in the right sentence bracket, referred to as V-final (den Besten, 1989). Crucially, the V-final order is assumed to be the default, as it is allowed in all contexts. Some types of subordinate clauses allow V2 placement in addition to the V-final order. V2 is assumed to be the marked verb order: first, it is not possible for all types of subordinate clauses. Second, in clause types that allow variation between V-final and V2, V2 is licensed only in specific contexts. Among the types that allow V2 as well as V-final are certain types of complement clauses (verba dicendi, doxastic predicates, preference predicates, evidential verbs of perception), relative clauses, obwohl ‘although’ clauses, and weil ‘because’ clauses (Reis, 1997, 2013; Gärtner, 2001; Antomo, 2012; Sanfelici, Schulz & Trabandt, 2017). Notably, in all these cases V2 is allowed only if specific licensing conditions are met, i.a. prosodic integration, sentence-final position of the embedded clause (e.g., Antomo & Steinbach, 2010; Antomo, 2012; Reis, 1997). Focusing on weil ‘because’ clauses, the present study investigated children’s sensitivity to the default verb order in subordinate clauses that allow variation between V2 and Vfinal in the target system.