As German corpora of recorded speech, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 1995), mainly consist of data from children older than two, a complete picture of the onset of German NPIs cannot be given. The little data available from younger children (in the corpora compiled by Clahsen, Wagner, and Wode) indicate that the first NPIs to appear are brauchen (have to/need), mehr (anymore), and gar (at all), which from the beginning are restricted to the classical negation nicht (not).

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