Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 198, May 2020, 104167
Cognition

Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104167Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Morphology
Pause
Polysynthesis
Psycholinguistics
Speech processing

Cited by (0)