Ute Bohnacker’s (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second(V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2language) is an attempted rebuttal of Håkansson et al.’s (2002) workon first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory onwhich the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998).The article by Håkansson et al. presented empirical evidence from asimilar population of learners (native language Swedish, target language German), showing that V2 is not transferred at the initial state.Unfortunately, Bohnacker misrepresents key aspects of our work onL1 transfer and, paradoxically, her own data constitute empirical evidence supporting our position, as we show in this response.