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Purpose: Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment (LI)., Method: Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object., Results: The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. For both groups of children, the frequency of occurrence of the inflection in the language was a significant predictor of accuracy level. The two groups of children were also similar in their pattern of errors. Inflections produced in place of the correct inflection usually differed from the correct form on a single dimension (e.g., tense or definiteness), though no single dimension was consistently problematic., Conclusions: Accounts that assume problems specific to agreement do not provide an explanation for the observed pattern of findings. The findings are generally compatible with accounts that assume processing limitations in children with LI, such as the morphological richness account. One nonmorphosyntactic factor (the retention of sequences of sounds) appeared to be functionally related to inflection accuracy and may prove to be important in a language with numerous inflections such as Hungarian.

Timed picture naming was compared in seven languages that vary along dimensions known to affect lexical access. Analyses over items focused on factors that determine cross-language universals and cross-language disparities. With regard to universals, number of alternative names had large effects on reaction time within and across languages after target-name agreement was controlled, suggesting inhibitory effects from lexical competitors. For all the languages, word frequency and goodness of depiction had large effects, but objective picture complexity did not. Effects of word structure variables (length, syllable structure, compounding, and initial frication) varied markedly over languages. Strong cross-language correlations were found in naming latencies, frequency, and length. Other-language frequency effects were observed (e.g., Chinese frequencies predicting Spanish reaction times) even after within-language effects were controlled (e.g., Spanish frequencies predicting Spanish reaction times). These surprising cross-language correlations challenge widely held assumptions about the lexical locus of length and frequency effects, suggesting instead that they may (at least in part) reflect familiarity and accessibility at a conceptual level that is shared over languages.

Powerful figures, such as politicians, who show a behavioural pattern of exuberant self-confidence, recklessness, and contempt for others may be the subject of the acquired personality disorder, the hubris syndrome, which has been demonstrated to leave its mark on speech patterns. Our study explores characteristic language patterns of Hungarian prime ministers (PMs) with a special emphasis on one of the key indicators of hubris, the shift from the first person "I" to "we" in spontaneous speech. We analyzed the ratio of the first-person singular ("I") and plural ("we") pronouns and verbal inflections in the spontaneous parliamentary speeches of four Hungarian PMs between 1998–2018. We found that Viktor Orbán during his second premiership (2010–2014) used first person plural relative to singular inflections more often than the other three PMs during their terms. Orbán and another Hungarian PM, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who were re-elected at some point showed an increased ratio of first-person plural vs. singular inflections and personal pronouns by their second term, likely reflecting increasing hubristic tendencies. The results show that the ratio of "I" and "we" usually studied in English texts also show changes in a structurally different language, Hungarian. This finding suggests that it is extended periods of premiership that may increase hubristic behaviour in political leaders, not only experiencing excessive power. The results are particularly elucidating regarding the role of re-elections in political leaders' hubristic speech–and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the effect of acute alcohol consumption on speech in Hungarian subjects. The measures used to reveal these effects were tongue-twisters, which were grouped according to their linguistic features. The number and type of speech errors while uttering the tongue-twisters were compared between intoxicated and sober conditions. The results showed that subjects made more speech errors in alcohol influenced than in sober states in all types of the tongue-twisters except for those using foreign words. Changes in the articulation rate, number of pauses and fundamental frequency were investigated as well. In the intoxicated state, no changes were observed in fundamental frequency and articulation rate, while the number of pauses increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the results of two experiments performed on Hungarian preverbal modifiers. This hypothetical grammatical concept includes such categorically different morphemes as verbal prefixes, objects with no article, nominal parts of complex predicates etc. They are all supposed to attach more directly to the verb than other moveable elements and to have a prototypical preverbal position. Both experiments tried to find psycholinguistic evidence for this privileged relationship between the verb and the preverbal modifiers and for their preferred ordering. In the first study adults had to provide pairwise word-relatedness judgements in a scaling task. The main results suggested that most of the proposed modifiers indeed have a privileged connection to their verb even if they are separated from the verb in the surface string. However, semantic relatedness also had an effect on the judgements. In the second experiment preschoolers participated in an elicited imitation task repeating sentences with the preverbal modifiers in preverbal or postverbal positions. In general, there was a strong tendency to redress the structures to the canonic form with preverbal modifiers in the immediately preverbal slot. In sum, the experiments give some psycholinguistic support for the intimate relationships between the preverbal modifiers and the verb and for their privileged position. The actual list of modifiers needs further clarification in consonance with the development of grammatical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the book "The Modularity of Mind. An Essay on Faculty Psychology," by Jerry A. Fodor. The general thesis of the book can be summarized using the author's dichotomies. There are two versions of faculty psychology, both historically and on the contemporary scene. The horizontal one, practiced by many modern psychometricians, suggests that there are qualitatively different faculties or propensities in the human mind, each of which, however, operates over several different contents. The second version, vertical faculties, operates with faculties of a much more restricted scope. The faculties suggested by this view are domain-specific and content-dependent. Thus, instead of a general faculty of memory, one would have to deal with musical and mathematical memory separately.

This paper examines the role of word order in the sentence interpretation of Hungarian children. The concept of perceptual strategies and its equivalents have been used more and more in the psycholinguistic literature. Among the many proposed strategies, one of the widest possible scope is the Noun-Verb-Noun strategy suggested by Thomas Bever. Bever has found that in the acquisition of English, the strategy is being formed and overgeneralized around four years, causing a systematic misinterpretation of passive sentences and some cleft constructions. A clearer "first noun is the agent" strategy was obtained from children showing no signs of the assymetry. Studies with Hungarian children are especially well suited to probe some of the issues involved. The case system clearly marks grammatical relations, while word order does not carry information about the roles of noun phrases as arguments of the verb. In studying sentence interpretation of Hungarian preschool children, the author aims to gain some hints on whether children tend to take order as a marker of basic relations like agency as well as on the course of differentiation between topic, agent and surface subject.

This section introduces the articles featured in the 1995 issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. The issue is devoted to sociolinguistics in Hungary. Most of the contributors are linguists and sociologists in the middle of their career. The study of relationships between language and society has a relatively long past in the Hungarian social science community. Traditional dialectologists and historical linguists have always had to have social considerations in mind when, for example, they had to account for some aspects of language change in terms of contact linguistics or when they had to motivate some of their attempts to intervene in the acceptance of certain forms. The papers by Kassai, Kontra, Pléh, and Terestyéni grew out of the project called the Hungarian National Sociolinguistic Survey (HNSS). The project is tightly bound to a sociological project run by Angelusz and Tardos to investigate the interaction of communicative patterns and knowledge styles. While it is much more sociological than sociolinguistic, the inclusion of Angelusz and Tardo's paper in the collection is justified by the fact that the HNSS relies crucially on their empirical findings. The volume also demonstrates some shortcomings of present-day Hungarian sociolinguistics.

The article deals with the tendency of the Hungarian language community to focus on stigmatization and hypercorrection. These tendencies are strong compared to most modern European language communities but not unlike some other East European language communities that are characterized by a relatively late coalescing of vernacular languages into a national language and the national into the official one. In the Hungarian sociolinguistic situation hypercorrection trends are evidently related to the efforts on the part of the school and the language cultivators to stigmatize certain forms as belonging to a substandard, uneducated language variety. Language cultivation refers to the organized efforts to keep the integrity of language from deterioration due to laziness, due to foreign influence, and due to a decrease in carefulness and to negligence. These efforts have their own scientific organization and publication organs and a large impact in schools, and they also receive extensive coverage in the media. This is an important factor because it means a large segment of the Hungarian population is constantly exposed to the norms advocated by them. On the part of educated speakers and the language cultivators there is a conscious effort to overcome the simplification processes. This rejection of neutralizations and simplification becomes social stigmatization in this process because less educated and less urbane speakers in general do not make use of this extra effort needed to overcome their natural tendencies.

Presents the foreword for the January 1, 1989 issue of the journal "Folia Linguistica."