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Related Concept Videos

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Unsoundness in aggregates due to volume changes is primarily caused by the physical alterations aggregates undergo, such as freezing and thawing, thermal changes, and wetting and drying. Unsound aggregates, when subjected to these changes, result in volume change upon disintegration. This, in turn, contributes to the deterioration of concrete, including scaling, pop-outs, and cracking. Particular types of aggregates, such as porous flints, cherts, and those containing clay minerals, are...
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 9, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
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Temperature shapes language sonority: Revalidation from a large dataset.

Tianheng Wang1, Søren Wichmann2, Quansheng Xia3

  • 1School of Liberal Arts, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.

PNAS Nexus
|December 7, 2023
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Human speech patterns, specifically sonority, correlate positively with global temperatures. Colder climates appear to weaken speech sonority, demonstrating climate

Keywords:
climateenvironmentevolutionlanguagesonority

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistic Phonetics
  • Environmental Linguistics
  • Language Evolution

Background:

  • Natural environmental factors influence human speech phonetic patterns.
  • A potential correlation between speech sonority and ambient temperature is of significant interest.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between average sonority of languages and global temperature.
  • To determine if climatic factors shape language evolution.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a comprehensive database of basic vocabularies from 5,293 languages.
  • Calculated average sonority for each language using a universal sonority scale.
  • Analyzed correlations across macroareas and language families.

Main Results:

  • Confirmed a significant positive correlation between language sonority and temperature on a global scale.
  • This relationship was observed across macroareas and language families but not within families.
  • Cold temperatures appear to exert a weakening effect on speech sonority.

Conclusions:

  • Climatic factors, particularly temperature, play a role in shaping phonetic patterns and language evolution.
  • Language adaptation to temperature is a slow process, with global climate trends showing a discernible impact.