In order to answer these questions, a case study involving the distribution of the plain-palatalized contrast in labial and coronal stops was carried out. A typological survey of languages with contrastive palatalization shows that the distinction between plain and palatalized segments is most often maintained in the syllable onset position and most commonly neutralized in the preconsonantal coda environment.
Palatalized labials are more susceptible to neutralization than the palatalized coronals.
The most common outcome of neutralization is a plain segment. In a number of articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual experiments I investigate Russian plain and palatalized stops in cross word-boundary sequences. The articulatory study reveals that the environments that generally induce neutralization exhibit the most variability in the magnitude and timing of the tongue body gesture, the articulatory correlate of the plain-palatalized contrast. They also show that that the effect of environment is different for palatalized labial and coronals. The results of perception, taken as derived scales, serve as input to a hypothetical learner constructing language-particular grammars.