Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy

Rikke L Bundgaard-Nielsen; Brett J Baker

Journal article

Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy

Rikke L Bundgaard-Nielsen, Brett J Baker

Cognition | Elsevier BV | Published : 2020

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104167

Open access

Download PDF

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 word..

View full abstract

University of Melbourne Researchers

Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen Author

Brett Baker Author

Related Projects (1)

Learning to talk whitefella way

Many Indigenous children speak Aboriginal English or 'Kriol', which often sounds very different to Standard Australian English. Understandin..

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our participants, and Leonie Murrungun who worked with us on the stimulus materials for this study. We also thank participants at ALS2015, SST2016, AMP2016 and LabPhon2018 for their comments, particularly Andy Butcher, Anne Cutler, Katherine Demuth, Nick Evans, Janet Fletcher, Mark Harvey, and Volya Kapatsinski. Special thanks to Elise Bell for her assistance in running these experiments, and Cameron Patrick, of the University of Melbourne Statistical Consulting Centre, for his invaluable help in running the statistical analysis. This study was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP130102624), and an ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Trans-disciplinary and Innovation Grant, whose assistance we also gratefully acknowledge. This paper was much improved due to the comments and assistance of the editor and three anonymous reviewers, whom we also thank.