It will be seen the same way categories are seen and yes it is duplicate content. Good SEO requires noindex on category pages, but I wouldn't use that on the home page. Let the home page get indexed and noindex your category pages.
I exclude my category pages and such in robots.txt. But the whole duplicate content thing is a myth. If it wasn't, then all wordpress blogs on the web would be penalized for having the same thing on the homepage as you have in single posts.
Perhaps Google's definition of duplicate content will help. Category searches A lot of internal linking Related Items plugin Inbound links to internal pages Archives Widget Make sure you have a search feature on you blog Blog your own posts (write refresher posts about older posts and link to them) Let's see, what else is there?
What i meant by traffic is, you will not be indexed for those pages. Search engines will not be bring any traffic to your subpages. the only bypass i can think of, write a fresh 100 words for the homepage and then post it linking to a unique full article.
The search engines will find your articles and index them. They will at least be linked under categories. You can use "noindex,follow" on category pages so SEs will follow the links. Besides that, the SEs will find them even if there are no links to them.