Intelligibility of consonants in VCV fragments excised from connected speech
Astrid Schmidt-Nielsen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
Confusions between pairs of intervocalic consonants excised from connected speech were investigated under several conditions of speech degradation: digital voice processing, noise, bandpass limiting. The stimuli were created by digitally extracting only the VCV portion from read sentences such as the following: “…wants to study teals and their breeding patterns.” /“…wants to study seals and their breathing patterns.” When these were presented to listeners, the distribution of the types of errors that were made, e.g., voicing, nasality, place of articulation, differed from those made on citation form syllable-initial consonants. Intervocalic consonants that were taken from word initial position scored higher initially than those taken from word medial or word final position, but the medial and final segments dropped less under mild degradations than did the initial ones. [Work supported by ONR.]