Human Recognition of Sustained Phonemes
Louis R. Focht · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1963
The capability of the human to resolve isolated phonemes was investigated by a series of forced-choice listening tests. Sustained utterances of 20 phonemes (11 voiced, 5 unvoiced, and 4 voiced fricatives) as spoken by 5 speakers were recorded and edited to eliminate all contextual clues and presented to a listening team. It was found that correct-phoneme-recognition scores averaged 62%. Control tests carried out with the same listeners and equipment, but using phonemes in context, were also performed. The control experiment yielded recognition scores of 96% and greater. However, when certain isolated phonemes were lumped together to form less than one-half as many classes of sounds as previously used, recognition scores rose to 95%. Details of both the experimental procedure and the experimental results are given.