Constraints on the acquisition of simplex and complex words in German

It is a common assumption that prosodic restrictions on the shape of children’s early productions refer to the prosodic word (cf. [1]). However, empirical research on word structure has focused almost exclusively on simplex words where the morphosyntactic and prosodic word boundaries coincide ([2], [3], [4], [5]). In this paper, we provide new evidence from the acquisition of German complex words (compounds and particle verbs) showing that the restriction to a single foot indeed holds for the prosodic word, not for the morphosyntactic word. Thus, our results corroborate the crucial function of the prosodic word in language development.