Lengthenings and filled pauses in Hungarian adults’ and children’s speech

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly in their position in the speech session between the age groups, which has implications regarding different planning strategies of adults and children. We also draw conclusions regarding the methodological considerations in the issue of identifying vowel lengthening supporting a previously formulated conception

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

Betegközpontú és paternalisztikus kapcsolatépítés az orvos-beteg viszonyban. A kapcsolatépítés pragmatikai és szupraszegmentális jellemzői

The relationship between healthcare professionals and patients plays a central role in patient care. Relationship building is an active, dynamic process unfolding in interactions, shaped by both verbal and non-verbal elements of communication. The goal of the present study is to highlight characteristic linguistic patterns of patient-centred and paternalistic styles of relationship building on the basis of an analysis of 8 instructional videos recorded with professional actors, simulating situations in healthcare. The 8 encounters feature 4 situations (at G.P. consultations), each enacted according to both the patient-centred and the paternalistic model of doctor behaviour. The study primarily focuses on suprasegmental features of semantically and syntactically (quasi-)equivalent utterances contributing to relationship building, treating them much like prosodic minimal pairs. Moreover, it also analyses the functioning of these utterances from a global, pragmatic perspective. As the analysis shows, beyond differences in the participants’ actions, knowledge representations, emotion-related communication and body language, the two styles of relationship building also diverge in terms of suprasegmental features, although in the sample under study, the discrepancies rarely amount to statistically verifiable trends. Keywords: doctor-patient communication, patient-centred and doctor-centred communication, relationship-building, instructional video