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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 analyzed 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. The diversity of languages in which this effect was found suggests that this might be a species-wide pattern—and one of several key factors for speech perception to distinguish the beginning of words within the stream of speech.

The work appears in Nature Human Behaviour.

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 within the vast majority of the world's languages. Now, for the first time, comparative linguists have observed a pattern of acoustic effects that may serve as a distinct marker across diverse languages: the systematic lengthening of consonants at the beginning of words.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the CNRS Laboratoire Structure et Dynamique des Langues (SeDyL), the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) used data from the novel DoReCo corpus, because it combines two features: Firstly, it covers an unprecedented amount of linguistic and cultural diversity of human speech, containing samples from 51 populations from all inhabited continents. Secondly, it provides precise timing information for each one of the more than one million speech sounds in the corpus.

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