Effects of Masking Speech on the Discriminability of Elementary Consonant Attributes
William D. Voiers · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1968
The Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) was used to test the effects of masking voices upon the discriminability six consonant attributes over a range of test speech-to-masking speech ratios. Pronounced qualitative differences were found between the speech-masking case and the case of bandlimited Gaussian masking noise, though some similarities were observed. Whereas Gaussian noise has relatively little effect upon the discriminability of voicing and nasality, voice maskers substantially reduce the discriminability of these attributes. Speech masking has least effect upon the discriminability of sibilation and compactness, although these attributes are among the most susceptible to noise masking. However, both types of masker exert their greatest effect upon the discriminability of sustention (i.e., the fricative-plosive opposition). In general, speech maskers tend, less than noise, to bias listener perception of the various attributes. [This research was conducted under contract with Texas Instruments, Inc., Austin, Texas.]