Words in polysynthetic languages, such as the Australian language Wubuy, can be semantically complex and translate into whole phrases in analytic languages such as English. This raises questions about whether such words are like words in English, or whether they are more like phrases. In the following, we examine Wubuy speakers' knowledge of word-internal morphological complexity in a word-preference task, in which we test the acceptability of complex words into which artificial pauses have been embedded at a range of morphological junctures. The results show that participants prefer unmodified words and words with pauses inserted at semantically transparent morphological junctures over words with pauses at other junctures. There is no preference for unmodified words over words with pauses at transparent junctures. These results suggest that speakers have access to some word-internal morphological information, and that complex words may share characteristics of both words and phrases in, for instance, English.

中文翻译：

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暂停可接受性表示Wubuy中的单词内部结构。

多合成语言中的单词（例如澳大利亚语言Wubuy）在语义上可能会很复杂，并会以分析性语言（例如英语）翻译成整个短语。这就引起了这样的疑问：这些单词是英语单词还是更像短语。在下文中，我们将检查五位讲者在单词偏爱任务中对单词内部形态复杂性的了解，在其中我们测试复杂单词的可接受性，这些复杂单词在一系列形态交界处已嵌入了人工停顿。结果表明，参与者比未修饰的单词和在语义透明的形态学接合点处插入了停顿的单词要强于在其他接合点处具有停顿的单词。对于没有修饰的单词，没有优先选择在透明接合点处停顿的单词。