Some features of perceptual errors
Louis Goldstein, Catherine P. Browman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976
Two questions about the relationship between phonetic features and perceptual errors are explored: (1) When we mishear an utterance, what features are most likely to be in error? (2) Is there a hierarchy of feature values with respect to the likelihood of a given phoneme being incorrectly perceived; i.e., are phonemes with one value on a given feature more or less likely to be misheard than phonemes with another value on this same feature? Questions are answered with respect to a previously reported experiment [L. Goldstein, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 58, S58(A) (1975)], in which subjects heard one-, two-, and three-syllable meaningful speech segments cut out of context and reported what they heard. Results are relevant to constructing a hierarchy of acoustic information, in terms of the importance of this information for a listener making higher-level decisions about what word or phrase has been perceived. [Work supported by NIH.]