BEA – A multifunctional Hungarian spoken language database

In diverse areas of linguistics, the demand for studying actual language use is on the increase. The aim of developing a phonetically-based multi-purpose database of Hungarian spontaneous speech, dubbed BEA2, is to accumulate a large amount of spontaneous speech of various types together with sentence repetition and reading. Presently, the recorded material of BEA amounts to 260 hours produced by 280 present-day Budapest speakers (ages between 20 and 90, 168 females and 112 males), providing also annotated materials for various types of research and practical applications

Speech perception deficits and the underlying nature of developmental dysphasia

Developmental dysphasia is a specific and primary disorder of oral language development which occurs in children with normal hearing and normal intelligence, having neither objective neurological diseases nor emotional or communicative disorders, and is characterised by more serious deficiencies in perception than in production processes. The relevant literature has mainly been focusing on expressive linguistic skills so far; whereas with respect to the mechanism of speech perception, only certain component processes have been investigated. The present paper presents pioneering work in exploring specific perception disorders in dysphasic children and discusses interrelationships of the operation of component processes within the total system of speech perception. On the basis of the foregoing, delayed speech and the dissociation of production and perception are discussed in the framework of current theories of language acquisition and hypotheses concerning the operation of defective processes

Guest editor's note

During speaking, the mental lexicon is accessed to select the necessary words, and to retrieve their phonological and syntactic patterns. However, the nature of real-time activation of words and phonological rules is largely unknown. In Hungarian, voicing assimilation is a relatively strong phonological process prevailing both within and across words. While a lot is known about its phonological nature as well as its phonetic outcome, the temporal patterns of its implementation during speech production have not been analyzed yet. This paper deals with the temporal coding of voicing assimilation in language acquisition, in spontaneous speech (of subjects of various ages), and in repetition tasks. Results show that by the age of 4 Hungarian-speaking children acquire this phonological rule without mistakes, in spontaneous speech successful voicing assimilation depends on certain time limits partly depending also on the total temporal organization of speech coding, and without the higher-level semantic and syntactic organization of speech (shadowing task), subjects are not able to plan the encoding of voicing assimilation processes as securely as they do in spontaneous speech

CO-OCCURRENCES AND FREQUENCY OF DISFLUENCIES IN HUNGARIAN SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

Speech disfluencies are generally defined as phenomena that nterrupt the flow of speech and do not add propositional contents to an utterance. Most spoken disfluencies are not problems in speaking but the solutions to arising problems while speaking. There are various forms of disfluencies like long silent pauses, filled pauses, repeated words, fresh starts, false starts, repairs, prolongations, changes, diverse fillers, slips of the tongue, etc. Spontaneous speech differs not only in the amount and frequency of disfluencies it contains but also in the types that the actual speakers produce. The question arises whether there is any tendency to be traced concerning language- specific (occurrences and) frequency of various types of disfluencies in fluent speech. In this paper we take a closer look at the types, co- occurrences and relative frequency of disfluencies in Hungarian spontaneous speech. The results show that types of uncertainty occur at every 5.47 words in the analyzed material, there are errors at every 33.25 words while there are interruptions at every 10.1 words without silent pauses. The disfluency phenomenon is more speaker-dependent than language dependent. The types and occurrences of these phenopmena are discussed in details in the paper first time for Hungarian

Variability in the articulation and perception of a word

The words making up a speaker’s mental lexicon may be stored as abstract phonological representations or else they may be stored as detailed acoustic-phonetic representations. The speaker’s articulatory gestures intended to represent a word show relatively high variability in spontaneous speech. The aim of this paper is to explore the acoustic-phonetic patterns of the Hungarian word akkor ‘then, at that time’. Ten speakers’ recorded spontaneous speech with a total duration of 255 minutes and containing 286 occurrences of akkor were submitted to analysis. Durational and frequency patterns were measured by means of the Praat software. The results obtained show higher variability both within and across speakers than it had been expected. Both the durations of the words and those of the speech sounds, as well as the vowel formants, turned out to significantly differ across speakers. In addition, the results showed considerable within-speaker variation as well. The correspondence between variability in the objective acoustic-phonetic data and the flexibility and adaptive nature of the mental representation of a word will be discussed.For the perception experiments, two speakers of the previous experiment were selected whose 48 words were then used as speech material. The listeners had to judge the quality of the words they heard using a five-point scale. The results confirmed that the listeners used diverse strategies and representations depending on the acoustic-phonetic parameters of the series of occurrences of akkor

The mental lexicon: Results of some word association experiments

There are numerous hypotheses concerning the structure, size, and strategies of adults’ mental lexicon. This is the first time, however, that children’s mental vocabularies are analysed using the technique of free word associations (with the participation of two hundred 12-year-old and two hundred 13-year-old pupils). The analysis focuses on both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the data like types of associations, lexical representations, distribution of word categories or semantic analysis of words. Comparisons are also made with a very similar material found in the Hungarian literature that provides a unique opportunity to look at the differences of the mental lexicon after 60 years. The discussion concerns (i) the patterns of the tested children’s mental lexicon (including the individual performances) and (ii) vocabulary changes seen as a multifactorial consequence of the progress of time. The hypothesis about the speed of lexical access being a definitive factor in the development of the mental lexicon has been confirmed and may be applied to other languages as well

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