This paper has focused on the production data of 8 Spanish undergraduate students. A striking fact of these data is that these Spanish undergraduate students in their 2nd year of German show more difficulty on XVSO structures than on those of embedded clauses (SOV). This suggests that the developmental sequence of syntax attested by ZISA results differs from the distribution of non native forms in more advanced learners.
On the other hand, the gradual incorporation of SOV structures suggests that instruction and input data indeed trigger what Platzack (1996) calls an approach from “The Initial Hypothesis of Syntax (IHS)” towards the system of the L2.
Data showed also that abstract movement due to feature values are difficult to detect for XVSO structures, while students seem to be more sensitive to explicit complementizer with inherent LC-features with verb final patterns.