Abstract
Most previous studies of the confusability of speech sounds have presented nonsense syllables in isolation, and have been limited to the confusability of consonants with other consonants or vowels with other vowels. In this experiment, the relative perceptual salience of the phonetic properties of longer speech segments was investigated. One‐, two‐, and three‐syllable English words and phrases were excised from recordings of complete sentences. Words and phrases were chosen to include a large number of different stress patterns. All English (except [ɔι]) appeared in both stressed and unstressed syllables, and all English consonants (except [ŋ] and (ȝ]) occurred syllable‐initially in stressed, unstressed, and reduced syllables. Word frequency was also controlled. Subjects listened to the excised segments and were asked to identify each one. Transcriptions of subjects' recorded responses were analyzed to determine subjects' errors. Errors were systematic and a hierarchy of relative perceptual salience of phonetic properties (eg. consonant vs vowel, stressed vs unstressed syllable) was determined. This hierarchy is more relevant to understanding how we extract acoustic information in normal speech perception than confusabllity studies using isolated syllables.
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