Acoustic-Phonetic Analysis of two Words on the Way to Becoming Fillers

Two words in present-day Hungarian (a conjunction and a pronoun) seem to be undergoing a functional change, acquiring the function of fillers, in addition to maintaining their lexical function. Seventeen narratives from the BEA Hungarian Spontaneous Speech Corpus were used to analyze the acoustic-phonetic patterns of these words. Significant differences were found in word duration and second formant values depending on function. Our data confirmed that these words are indeed undergoing a functional change, manifested in changes of articulation.