ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lexibank 2: pre-computed features for large-scale lexical data.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a typologically diverse sample of 51 languages. Using Bayesian multilevel regression, we find that on average, word-initial consonants are about 13 ms longer than word-medial consonants. The cross-linguistic distribution of the effect indicates that despite individual differences in the phonology of the sampled languages, the lengthening of word-initial consonants is a widespread strategy to mark the onset of words in the continuous acoustic signal of human speech. These findings may be crucial for a better understanding of the incremental processing of speech and speech segmentation.
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