A new study by linguists suggests that word-initial consonants are, on average, around 13 milliseconds longer than their non-initial counterparts across a diverse sample of languages. This finding may be a key factor in speech perception and how humans distinguish the beginning of words.
Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words from each other with astonishing precision and speed. To find out how this is possible, a team of linguists has analysed durations of consonants at different positions in words and utterances across a diverse sample of languages. They have found that word-initial consonants are, on average, around 13 milliseconds longer than their non-initial counterparts.
Distinguishing between words is one of the most difficult tasks in decoding spoken language. Yet humans do it effortlessly -- even when languages do not seem to clearly mark where one word ends and the next begins. The acoustic cues that aid this process are poorly understood and understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages.
The authors conclude that lengthening may be one of several factors that help listeners identify word boundaries and thus segment speech into distinct words -- along with other factors, such as articulatory strengthening, which has not been comparatively studied in detail so far. In the current study, some languages additionally showed evidence of a shortening effect following pauses at the beginning utterance.
Researchers have found that languages around the world have words for 'this' and 'that'. The 45-strong international team studied 29 languages from around the world including ...
Speechperception Linguistics Languages Consonants Wordsegmentation
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