This is one of those cases where for readability sake, I would separate the split logic from the case logic. This isn't going to win any perl golf competitions but future maintainers will not try to hunt you down!
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $input = "I am a GIRL";
my $output = [];
# split input by non-words ... if you need to keep non-word
# characters then you'll need a different regex
foreach my $word ( split( /\W+/, $input ) ) {
# if the word is all upper case and it's not a single letter
if( $word =~ /^\p{Uppercase}+$/ && length( $word ) > 1 ) {
push( @$output, $word );
} else {
push( @$output, lc $word );
}
}
print join( ' ', @$output ), "\n";
update: Fix regex from /\p{Lu}+/ to /^\p{Uppercase}+$/