Effects of Broad-Band Masking Noise on Consonant Confusions
M. D. Wang, R. C. Bilger, Walt Jesteadt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1972
Perceptual confusions were obtained at six speech-to-noise ratios ranging from −10 to +15 dB, at over-all noise levels of 50, 65, 80, and 95 dB SPL. Stimuli were four sets of CV and VC nonsense syllables formed by combining all English consonants with the vowels /i,a,u/. Noise levels of 80 and 95 dB resulted in poorer discrimination, particularly at moderate speech-to-noise ratios. Performance also varied as a function of vowel, syllables with /u/ being consistently better discriminated than others. An iterative feature analysis of transmitted information revealed that in both the Miller and Nicely [J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 27, 338–352 (1955)] and Chomsky and Halle [Sound Pattern of English (Harper & Row, New York, 1968)] feature systems, voicing accounted for the greatest relative transmitted information. [Research supported by a grant from SRS].