Words with unvoiced initial consonants are underlined. Frequency is represented on the y axis (0–35 kHz) and time on the x axis (–50 to 700 ms).

They have found that word-initial consonants are, on average, around 13 milliseconds longer than their non-initial counterparts. The diversity of languages for which this effect was found suggests ...

Word-initial consonant lengthening - a potential universal? "At the outset, we expected to find evidence contradicting the hypothesis that word-initial lengthening is a universal linguistic trait.

Interestingly ‘le’ does not normally aspirate the initial consonant of the following noun, ‘le mála’ (with a bag), but it does aspirate in this phrase.

The initial consonant sounds in these words are not used in English, at least to start words. English ends words with those clusters, though: 'hats', 'chops'.

The struggle to understand the phonetics of Chinese led to the development of rime tables and the theory of 36 initial consonants, which scholars believed could help reconstruct any syllable.