The realisation of voicing assimilation rules in Hungarian spontaneous and read speech: Case studies

Hungarian represents a particularly fruitful ground for exploring voicing assimilation. Although this topic has been extensively analysed, a contradiction can be observed between most phonological descriptions and acoustic-phonetics-based studies of voicing assimilation. Theoretical works suggest that this process in Hungarian speech is a purely regressive, obligatory and categorical phenomenon, but in practice divergent realisations can be observed. In the present paper three case studies of voicing assimilation are performed. CCC clusters, CC clusters interrupted by pause and partially voiced realisations were analysed. The results showed that in the first two cases the speech planning process and the degree of self-monitoring were the most influential factors, while the various concomitances of voicing and devoicing arising due to aerodynamic and articulatory reasons resulted in partially voiced realisations. The variability of the data confirms the hypothesis that Hungarian voicing assimilation is a gradient and sometimes only partly regressive process. Even if it operates mainly obligatorily, several factors can override it

Hungarian vowel quantity neutralisation as a potential social marker

Hungarian is a language with distinctive vowel quantity, but it seems that quantity discrimination in acoustic and perceptual terms is less robust for high vowels than for low ones. In this paper, we argue that the unstable behaviour of high vowels could refer to a sound change from below in Labov's terminology. Due to our results, quantity loss was observed both for high and partly also for mid vowels, especially in unstressed position. The extent of quantity neutralisation showed an interaction with speech style, linguistic attitude, and partly also social status, but not with gender, age-dependent occupation or regional affiliation

Anticipatory coarticulation in Hungarian VnC sequences

The duration of the vowel and the nasal was analyzed in the casual pronunciation of Hungarian words containing the sequence V n .C, where ‘.’ is a syllable boundary and C is a stop, affricate, fricative, or approximant. It was found that due to anticipatory coarticulation the duration of n is significantly shorter before fricatives and approximants than before stops and affricates.A teaching algorithm was used to distinguish between stops/affricates and fricatives/approximants in V n C sequences. We used an approach to the classification of C by means of the support vector machine (SVM) and the properties of Radial basis function (RBF) kernel (using MATLAB, version 7.0). The results show close to 95% correct responses for the stop/affricate vs. fricative/approximant distinction of C, as opposed to about 60% correct responses for the classification of the voicing feature of C

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Dynamic Models of Language Evolution: The Linguistic Perspective

Language is probably the key defining characteristic of humanity, an immensely powerful tool which provides its users with an infinitely expressive means of representing their complex thoughts and reflections, and of successfully communicating them to others. It is the foundation on which human societies have been built and the means through which humanity’s unparalleled intellectual and technological achievements have been realized. Although we have a natural intuitive understanding of what a language is, the specification of a particular language is nevertheless remarkably difficult, if not impossible, to pin down precisely. All languages contain many separate yet integral systems which work interdependently to allow the expression of our thoughts and the interpretation of others’ expressions: each has, for instance, a set of basic meaningless sounds (e.g. [e], [l], [s]) which can be combined to make different meaningful words and parts of words (e.g. else, less, sell, -less ); these meaningful units can be combined to make complex words (e.g. spinelessness, selling ), and the words themselves can then be combined in very many complex ways into phrases, clauses and an infinite number of meaningful sentences; finally each of these sentences can be interpreted in dramatically different ways, depending on the contexts in which it is uttered and on who is doing the interpretation. Languages can be analysed at any of these different levels, which make up many of the sub-fields of linguistics, and the primary job of linguistic theorists is to try to explain the rules which best explain these complex combinations