| Why do some words roll off the tongue, whereas others cause breaks in speech?

Question

For example:

Break: ABCDEFGHIJK
Roll-Off: LMNOP

You can say “LMNOP” much faster, because it “rolls off the tongue”. This is the first example I could think of.

Why does this happen?

In: Other

Answer 1

I’m sure these comments are going to make it into r/badlinguistics .

A short answer has to do with how sounds are articulated and something called sonority. As some commenters have pointed out, different sounds are produced differently in the mouth in terms of place and manner.

Try googling or looking on Wikipedia for introductory phonetics and “articulation”.