Pragmatic functions of lengthenings and filled pauses in the adult-directed speech of Hungarian children

Two most common disfluencies of spontaneous speech, vowel lengthenings (VLE) and non-lexicalized filled pauses (NLFP) were investigated in the adult-directed speech of eight Hungarian children. Though VLE and NLFP might seem to be similar vocalizations, recent investigations have shown that their occurrences might differ remarkably in child speech and may al-so change as a function of age. Based on these findings, in the present study the functional analysis of VLEs and NLFPs was performed. It was hypothesized that in child speech the two phenomena have roles not only in speech planning, but also in discourse management, and that they show functional distribution. The analysis provided evidence that VLE is more common than NLFP. VLE often tends to mark discourse events and may play a role in turn-final floor-holding strategies, while NLFP is mostly connected to speech planning, and occasionally, it may also participate in turn-taking gestures, as well

Speech perception at its best: Extracting linguistic information from acoustically underspecified input. The case of singing

High-pitched sung vowels are “underspecified” due to i) the tuning of the F1 to the f0 accompanying pitch-raising, and ii) the wide harmonic spacing of the voice source resulting in the undersampling of the vocal tract transfer function. Therefore, sung vowel intelligibility is expected to decrease as the f0 increases. On the basis of the literature of speech perception it is often suggested that sung vowels are better perceived if uttered in CVC context (than in isolation) even at high f0, but the results for singing are contradictory. In the present study we further investigate this question. We compare vowel identification in sense and nonsense CVC sequences and show that the positive effect of the context disappears if the number of legal choices is similar in both conditions, meaning that any positive effect of the CVC context may only stem from the smaller number of possible responses, i.e. higher probabilities

A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM SKILL ACQUISITIONS MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT FOR LESOTHO

Dual economy, large unemployment, a fixed number of skilled workers, perfect capital mobility, migrant labor force working in South African gold mines, and a cycle of poverty characterize Lesotho. This paper develops a general equilibrium model for Lesotho specifying these absorbing economic characteristics. We are particularly interested in constructing a rising step skill acquisition function, which shows that small infusions of human-capital investment would not pull the economy out of its poverty trap, but a large infusion would.Lesotho, Skill Acquisition, Human Capital, Economic Development, General Equilibrium

On the Hungarian sung vowels

Singing at a very high pitch is associated with vocal tract adjustments in professional western operatic singing. However, as of yet there is an inadequate amount of data available on the extent of the acoustic transformation the Hungarian vowels undergo during singing. The author’s purpose is to evaluate the acoustic and articulatory changes of Hungarian vowel qualities, and examine the effect of these changes on the intelligibility of sounds, which has not yet been done for Hungarian. The paper contains a brief summary of formerly described tendencies for other languages and data for Hungarian from pilot studies carried out by the author with an adult soprano’s and a child’s sung vowels

Formant strategies of professional female singers at high fundamental frequencies

When the soprano raises the fundamental frequency above the first formant of a vowel, a remarkable loss of acoustic energy and linguistic information occurs along with an abrupt change in the voice timbre. To avoid these effects, sopranos are assumed to tune their first formant to the raised fundamental frequency. The support for this claim is mostly based on formant data provided by indirect measurement methods and articulatory data, since direct acoustic data becomes more difficult (or even impossible) to obtain as the fundamental frequency gets higher. In the present study a new combination of measurement methods is introduced. The aim was to extract formant data of three sopranos in the entire set of the Hungarian vowel inventory in a wide pitch range. The results provide evidence for the technique of tuning the first formant to the raised high fundamental frequency in a substantial amount of data