Viktória Horváth

Development of a Large Spontaneous Speech Database of Agglutinative Hungarian Language

In this paper, a large Hungarian spoken language database is introduced. This phonetically-based multi-purpose database contains various types of spontaneous and read speech from 333 monolingual speakers (about 50 minutes of speech sample per speaker). This study presents the background and motivation of the development of the BEA Hungarian database, describes its protocol and the transcription procedure, and also presents existing and proposed research using this database. Due to its recording protocol and the transcription it provides a challenging material for various comparisons of segmental structures of speech also across languages.

Changes in articulation accompanying functional changes in word usage

Two words in present-day Hungarian, the conjunction tehat ‘that is’ and ‘consequently’ and the pronoun ilyen ‘like this’ seem to be undergoing a functional change, acquiring the function of fillers, while retaining their former lexical function, too. Twenty narratives were drawn from the Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Corpus (BEA), to analyze the acoustic-phonetic patterns of these words. Both words showed significant differences in duration depending on function. The first and second formant values of the conjunction tehat showed significant differences depending on whether it was used as a filler or in its original function as a conjunction. The formants of the stressed vowel in the pronoun ilyen did not show any differences with either males or females, but the second formant of the unstressed vowel, depending on function, showed significant variations with male subjects. Apparently, females make an unconscious distinction between the two functions only by varying the time structure of the word. Our data confirmed that these words are indeed undergoing a functional change, which is manifested in changes of their temporal patterns and, to some extent, in the articulation of their vowels.

Speech processing in children with functional articulation disorders

Abstract This study explored auditory speech processing and comprehension abilities in 5–8-year-old monolingual Hungarian children with functional articulation disorders (FADs) and their typically developing peers. Our main hypothesis was that children with FAD would show co-existing auditory speech processing disorders, with different levels of these skills depending on the nature of the receptive processes. The tasks included (i) sentence and non-word repetitions, (ii) non-word discrimination and (iii) sentence and story comprehension. Results suggest that the auditory speech processing of children with FAD is underdeveloped compared with that of typically developing children, and largely varies across task types. In addition, there are differences between children with FAD and controls in all age groups from 5 to 8 years. Our results have several clinical implications.

Boundary Markers in Spontaneous Hungarian Speech

The aim of this paper is an objective presentation of temporal features of spontaneous Hungarian narratives, as well as a characterization of separable portions of spontaneous speech. Ten speakers’ spontaneous speech materials taken from the BEA Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Database were analyzed in terms of hierarchical units of narratives (durations, speakers’ rates of articulation, number of words produced, and the interrelationships of all these). We conclude that (i) the majority of speakers organize their narratives in similar temporal structures, (ii) thematic units can be identified in terms of certain prosodic criteria, (iii) there are statistically valid correlations between factors like the duration of phrases, the word count of phrases, the rate of articulation of phrases, and pausing characteristics, and (iv) these parameters exhibit extensive variability both across and within speakers.