Consonant co-occurrence in stems across languages: Automatic analysis and visualization of a phonotactic constraint

In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of Similar Place Avoidance (SPA), ac-cording to which successive consonants within stems sharing the same place of articulation are avoided. This principle has recently been hypothesized as a uni-versal tendency although evidence from only a few languages scattered across the world has been considered. Using meth-ods taken from the field of Visual Analyt-ics, which have demonstrably been shown to help with understanding complex in-teractions across large data sets, we in-vestigated a large crosslinguistic lexical database (comprising data on more than 4,500 languages) and found that a univer-sal tendency can indeed be maintained.