Abstract:

This presentation deals with the Slovakia Hungarian dialectal talking books, collected at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Processing these audiobooks has been carried out with the help of the Bihalbocs software developed by Domokos Vékás and Fruzsina Sára Vargha in Hungary. The advantage of this software is that the transcribed forms can be aligned with the audio files showing their pronunciation, and this connection between the two is kept in the database as well. The talking books are created using a process that allows the audio recording and its phonetic transcription to appear simultaneously, so it is a multimedia dialect text collection. The talking books can also provide assistance in teaching since they would allow students to browse through the texts and the aligned audio files with their mobile phones or tablets in class as well as to copy and edit parts of them. This presentation deals with tasks related to talking books that point out dialectal phenomena based on students’ grammatical knowledge. These tasks can also be used to highlight the differences between spoken and written language. The reading comprehension tasks related to the diversity of content in talking books can be used to disseminate ethnographic, cultural, and local history knowledge.

Keywords:

Dialectology, education, Slovakia Hungarian regional dialects, talking books, grammar tasks.