Study of Twenty-Six Intervocalic Consonants as Spoken and Recognized by Four Language Groups
Sadanand Singh, John W. Black · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1966
Twenty-six intervocalic consonants were recorded by three speakers of each of four languages—Hindi, English, Arabic, and Japanese—and heard by 24 speakers of each of them. The data were treated in two ways. (1) An analysis of variance indicated that listening groups differed and that consonants were unequal in their intelligibility and showed statistically significant interactions between speakers and consonants, between listeners and consonants, and among consonants, listeners, and speakers. All speakers spoke better and all listeners listened better when saying and hearing sounds of their native language. (2) A quantitative procedure employed by Miller and Nicely was adapted to ascertain which features were retained by the listeners in their error responses and whether or not these were similar from one language group to another. All consonants were classified in a binary manner in relation to each of seven channels into which the voice communication network was subdivided. The unusual outcome lay in the ranks of the seven channels in terms of the extents to which they were correctly preserved in the responses. A single rank order in this regard was duplicated for all the listening groups: (1) nasality, (2) place, (3) liquid, (4) voicing, (5) duration, (6) friction, and (7) aspiration.