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Comments on an article about the link between consonant-vowel (CV) syllables and degrees of baby-holding by Melvin and Carole R. Ember which appeared in the Volume 101, 1999 edition of the 'American Anthropologist' journal. Communicative efficiency promotion; Individual vowel and consonant sounds' sonority variations; Association of sonority with warm and mild climates.

The authors reflect on the findings concerning on how climate, plant cover and mountainous terrain affects the sonority of language. They argue that warmer climate languages contribute to a higher proportion of consonant-vowel syllables and language sonority. The authors provide a discussion on the experiment carried which focuses on measuring the length of word through phonetic segments with the aim of evaluating speech and phonetic differences in languages.