Consonant intelligibility in sentences: Effects of word position and narrow‐band processing

Abstract

The intelligibility of pairs of consonant sounds was investigated using pairs of interchangeable sentences, e.g.: He is studying (Job/Jove) in his world religion course. There were three pairs of sentences for each contrast, with the contrast occurring in word initial, word medial, and word final position. The test conditions included a 2400 bit/s linear predictive coding (LPC) voice processing algorithm and unprocessed speech. There were 60 listeners in each condition. The consonant pairs selected for this experiment were among those that had been shown to be most vulnerable under LPC processing in previous research [A. Schmidt‐Nielsen, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 74, 726–738 (1983)]. Individual pairs were more poorly recognized in some word positions than in others. Contrary to previous results, the average performance for phonemes in word medial and final positions was as good as for word initial position. These results will be compared with earlier results using VCV fragments excised from running speech and with results from standard intelligibility tests.