A cross‐sectional study of disfluency characteristics in children’s spontaneous speech

Since both the erroneous and the well-formed, norm-following utterances are produced by the same rules of production, the analysis of disharmonic phenomena and self-repairs can help the researcher to look into the hidden operation of speech planning processes, also in the stages of language acquisition. The aim of the present study is to analyze age-specific patterns of children’s disfluencies and repair strategies. Occurrences of various types of disfluencies, the repair ratio and the duration of editing phases were examined in spontaneous speech samples of seventy monolingual Hungarian-speaking children aged between 6 and 13. Results seem to confirm that the ratio of self-repairs depends on the children’s age and the type of disfluency. Findings of our cross-sectional analysis shed light on the changes of speech fluency which may be associated with the developing language usage

Perception and Production of Geminate Timing in Hungarian Voiceless Stops

Hungarian is a language that expresses semantic differences using contrastive consonant length. Previous research in many languages confirmed that duration is the most important acoustic correlate of the singleton-geminate contrast. The present study aims to examine the acoustic and perceptual correlates which distinguish single stops from their geminate counterparts in Hungarian. The main question is how closure duration contributes to the perception and production of the length contrast of voiceless stops? Results confirmed that closure duration is the main acoustic attribute that distinguishes between singletons and geminate stops in Hungarian, and it is a sufficient cue for discriminating them in perception as well. Analysis of the relationship between consonant and preceding vowel duration did not support the strategy of temporal compensation. Findings are supposed to explore the relationship between the acoustic and perceptual domains and shed light on the primary/secondary acoustic features of consonant length opposition in Hungarian

A rövid és hosszú zöngétlen explozívák észlelése felnőtteknél és kisiskolás gyermekeknél

There has been much research indicating that a specific speech sound is characterized by wide variability in timing of articulation. Despite the wide variability and the considerable overlap in the duration of singleton and geminate realisations, it is also confirmed by previous production studies that the primary acoustic attribute that distinguishes geminates from singletons is duration. In speech perception research, it is an essential question how listeners discriminate phonological categories of quantity along a continuous durational scale of the phonetic realisations. This perceptual task seems to be more difficult for children than for adults. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of duration as a perceptual distinction between single and geminate stops using a binary discrimination test of stops with systematically manipulated closure duration. The main question was what kind of similarities and differences can be found between 7-8-year-old children’ and adults’ perceptual shifts from singleton to geminate. Results confirmed that closure duration is a sufficient and adequate perceptual cue in the distinction of single and geminate stops both in children and adults; however, perceptual shifts differed between children and adults, and depended on the place of articulation. Moreover, displacement of the response curves based on the original quantity of stimuli (originally geminate or originally singleton) indicated that cues other than closure duration may contribute to the length contrast in Hungarian stops

Nevetések automatikus felismerése mély neurális hálók használatával

A nonverbális kommunikáció fontos szerepet játszik a beszéd megértésében. A beszédstílus függvényében a nonverbális jelzések típusa és előfordulása is változik. A spontán beszédben például az egyik leggyakoribb nonverbális jelzés a nevetés, amelynek számtalan kommunikációs funkciója van. A nevetések funkcióinak elemzése mellett megindultak a kutatások a nevetések automatikus felismerésére pusztán az akusztikai jelből [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Az utóbbi években a beszédfelismerés területén, a keretszintű fonémaosztályozás feladatában uralkodóvá vált a mély neurális hálók (DNN-ek) használata, melyek háttérbe szorították a korábban domináns GMM-eket [7,8,9]. Jelen kutatásban mély neurális hálókat alkalmazunk a nevetés keretszintű felismerésére. Kísérleteinket három jellemzőkészlettel folytatjuk: a GMM-ek esetében hagyományosnak számító MFCC és PLP jellemzők mellett alkalmazzuk az FBANK jellemzőkészletet, amely 40 Mel szűrősor energiáiból, illetve azok első- és másodrendű deriváltjaiból áll. Vizsgáljuk továbbá, hogy az egyes frekvenciasávok milyen mértékben segítenek a mély neurális hálónak a nevetést tartalmazó keretek azonosításában. Ezért a dolgozat második részében kísérletileg rangsoroljuk, hogy az egyes sávok mennyire járulnak hozzá a mély neurális háló pontosságának eléréséhez