The study focuses on the acoustic and auditive analysis of Slovak laterals in seven different contexts in native and loan words. It has been determined statistically that the pronunciation of all speakers (newsreaders) used in the study differs from the postulated (hypothetical) standard model of the distribution of Slovak laterals based on the degree of hardness/softness. One of the main findings of the study is the discovery of these two tendencies (in the majority of speakers): Laterals followed by the sounds [e] and [e:] tend to remain in the vicinity of the systemic space of the phoneme /l/, and