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Comment
. 2025 Apr 15;15(1):12930.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-94850-0.

Not just the alveolar trill, but all "r-like" sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch

Rémi Anselme  1 , François Pellegrino  1 , Dan Dediu  2   3   4
Affiliations
Comment

Not just the alveolar trill, but all "r-like" sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch

Rémi Anselme et al. Sci Rep. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Alluvial plot showing the effects of our re-coding. The strata (the vertical stacked bars) are: left: the original WSPD coding of 211 “trilled /r/” (yellow) vs 164 “other” (blue); middle: our recoding as 145 “trilled /r/” vs 146 “other”, plus “contrast” (gray) for 49 languages contrasting a trill, “undecidable” (dark gray) for 33 languages with insufficient information for a conclusion, and “error” (red) for 2 languages with wrong codes; right: the 291 languages included in our analysis (green; i.e., those re-coded as “trilled /r/” or “other”) vs the 84 excluded (white). The flows show the number of languages affected by recoding (e.g., 124 languages retaining the original “trilled /r/” code, 34 becoming “other”, 24 “contrast”, 38 “undecidable” and 1 “error”…).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Comparing WSPD and the recoded results. Top and middle plots show the probability that a form uses /r/ if it means “rough” vs “smooth” in languages with a “trilled /r/” (left) vs “other” (right), in WSPD (top) and with the re-coded data (middle); colored circles represent families with size proportional to the number of languages; the big gray circles are the model predictions with 95% HDIs. The bottom plot shows the distribution of the difference in the same probabilities in languages with a “trilled /r/” (left, fully overlapping distributions) vs “other” (right) between WSPD (blue) and re-coded (yellow).
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References

    1. Winter, B., Sóskuthy, M., Perlman, M. & Dingemanse, M. Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages. Sci. Rep.12, 1035. 10.1038/s41598-021-04311-7 (2022). - PMC - PubMed
    1. Anselme, R. La représentation du trill en typologie: de l’acoustique à l’inventaire phonémique (Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2022). https://theses.hal.science/tel-04090606v1.
    1. Anselme, R., Pellegrino, F. & Dediu, D. What’s in the r? A review of the usage of the r symbol in the Illustrations of the IPA. J. Int. Phon. Assoc.10.1017/S0025100322000238 (2023).
    1. PHOIBLE Online. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2014). https://phoible.org/.
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