Why does aspirated stop consonants' voice onset time (VOT) increase in high altitude environments with reduced air density?

💡 Explanation

Aspirated stops exhibit longer VOT at high altitudes because reduced air density lowers the resistance to airflow during the period after the release of the consonant and before vocal fold vibration. Because the airflow is less impeded, aspiration duration increases; therefore, a longer VOT results, rather than changes in subglottal pressure or laryngeal control alone.

• Why does a legal argument based on flawed statistical data often fail to persuade a jury?
• Why does spatial reasoning exhibit variations across cultures, considering language relativity in map-reading tasks?
• A speaker's lexicon lacks productive morphological rules; which consequence follows regarding unfamiliar words?
• Why does a late-talking toddler exhibit slower vocabulary growth, even when exposed to varied linguistic input and displaying comprehension, compared to peers with typical language development?
• An engineer builds a voice assistant that misinterprets user commands when complex sentences contain multiple clauses connected by conjunctions. Which mechanism explains this semantic parsing failure?
• Why does initialism ambiguity frequently lead to misinterpretations in informal internet communication, despite contextual clues?