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The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with-e plurals, followed by the plural markers-e +U,-er [*] We are grateful to the children who took part in our study, to their families, and to the staff of the kindergartens where the study was conducted. We would also like to thank two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions. An earlier versio