Phoneme confusion analyses for evaluating an ear-insert microphone
John C. Webster, E. Schiller · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1977
Analyses were made of the errors made by a panel listening in noise to recordings of 250 PB words picked up by the ear-insert microphone of Ono and Saito [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, S106(A) (1976)]. Since the responses were of the open-set write-down type, errors consisted of no-responses and errors on initial and/or final consonants and/or on the medial vowel of the CVC monosyllabic words. In general errors were made on 160 of the 250 words consisting of 423 phonemic errors of which 68% were from the test vocabulary, 12% were not, and 20% were no-responses. Fifty percent of the phonemic errors were on the initial consonant, 34% on the final, and 16% on the vowel. Unvoiced stop and fricative errors occurred most often and most confusions were between and among them, 66% for initial and 78% for final consonants. The most error-prone vowel was [a]. The similarity between these and conventional-microphone errors says the ear-insert microphone is an acceptable alternative. [Supported by DOD and HEW.]