/r/ for rough

How phonemes relate to roughness ratings. Left: The ten most predictive phonemes in a random forest analysis for A English and B Hungarian; the vertical black line corresponds to the absolute value of the least predictive phoneme, which is a heuristic cut-off rule for predictors that do not contribute. Right: Boxplots (whiskers = smallest, largest value within 1.5× IQR) for words with and without /r/ in English and Hungarian.

Winter, B., Sóskuthy, M., Perlman, M., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1035. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-04311-7 PDF