news 2024

A new study shows that word-initial consonants are systematically lengthened across a diverse sample of languages 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.

For decades, researchers have assumed that people overestimate the risk of dramatic causes of death, such as road traffic accidents. The reason given for this was that such deaths are the subject of far greater media attention than more significant but less spectacular mortality risks. However, a study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now debunked this assumption.

Linguistic analysis provides insight into the vocabularies for body parts in more than a thousand languages Human bodies have similar designs. However, languages differ in the way they divide the body into parts and name them. A team of linguists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Passau conducted a comparison of body part vocabularies to shed light on the interplay between language, culture, and perception of the human body.