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.
Cite as: Grimm, A., Trommer, J. (2005) Constraints on the acquisition of simplex and complex words in German. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 45-48, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-35
@inproceedings{grimm05_interspeech,
author={Angela Grimm and Jochen Trommer},
title={{Constraints on the acquisition of simplex and complex words in German}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={45--48},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-35}
}