Crosslanguage Study of Perceptual Confusion of Plosive Phonemes in Two Conditions of Distortion
Sadanand Singh · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1966
The intelligibility of /p t k d b g/ as spoken and heard by native speakers and listeners of Hindi and English and the relationship of this intelligibility to the transitions of consonants to vowels in CV monosyllables was investigated. Phoneme boundaries were determined. A measure of intelligibility was obtained in terms of information transmitted per stimulus for four and two separate channels and a composite channel. The separate channels represented distinctive linguistic features. Through a comparison of the information transmitted by these systems, redundancy was quantified. There was uniformity among the four speaking-listening groups in information transmitted at six points of temporal segmentation and in 20 different bandwidths, as well as similarity in the importance of channels. Models of linearity were set to assess information as a function of (1) time, (2) width of the frequency band, and (3) lower frequency of the frequency band. Multiple correlations of 0.83 in the case of 1, 2, and 3, of 0.83 in the case of 1 and 2, and 0.77 in the case of 1 and 3 were found.