An Analysis of Perceptual Confusions Among Some English Consonants

TLDR

The study presented sixteen English consonants over distorted voice communication systems, had listeners guess each sound to record confusion patterns, and used an articulatory analysis based on five features—voicing, nasality, affrication, duration, and place—to characterize the phonemes. The results show that noise or low‑pass filtering produces consistent confusion patterns, high‑pass filtering yields random errors, voicing and nasality are largely unaffected while place of articulation is severely degraded, and each of the five articulatory features appears to be perceived independently, suggesting separate simple channels.

Abstract

Sixteen English consonants were spoken over voice communication systems with frequency distortion and with random masking noise. The listeners were forced to guess at every sound and a count was made of all the different errors that resulted when one sound was confused with another. With noise or low-pass filtering the confusions fall into consistent patterns, but with high-pass filtering the errors are scattered quite randomly. An articulatory analysis of these 16 consonants provides a system of five articulatory features or “dimensions” that serve to characterize and distinguish the different phonemes: voicing, nasality, affrication, duration, and place of articulation. The data indicate that voicing and nasality are little affected and that place is severely affected by low-pass and noisy systems. The indications are that the perception of any one of these five features is relatively independent of the perception of the others, so that it is as if five separate, simple channels were involved rather than a single complex channel.