Consonants are speech sounds made by closing the vocal tract in some way, while vowels are made by making it a different shape but leaving it open.

Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages. Nature Human Behaviour, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01988-4 ...

The answer partly depends on whether we are talking about the sounds or letters of vowels and consonants. By mentioning “alphabetic languages”, the questioner is presumably asking why most ...

New research from The University of Warwick has revealed that orangutans, the most arboreal of the great apes, produce consonant-like calls more often and of greater variety than their African ...

A comparison of consonant-like sounds in great apes suggests an arboreal lifestyle may have been a step towards complex speech in our ancestors By Richard Kemeny 20 December 2022 ...

The two NNJ groups were generally accurate (> 80%) in perceiving consonant length not only in Japanese, but also in Italian. However, the direction of NNJ learners’ misperception (i.e. singleton as ...