15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Consonant and Vowel Confusion Patterns by American English Listeners

Andrea Weber (1), Roel Smits (2)

(1) Saarland University, Germany
(2) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands

This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Weber, Andrea / Smits, Roel (2003): "Consonant and vowel confusion patterns by American English listeners", In ICPhS-15, 1437-1440.