Cooke, M. P. & Scharenborg, O. (2008) Identification of intervocalic consonants in stationary and nonstationary noise. Accepted for presentation at Acoust. Soc. Am. meeting, Paris, July 2008.
The factors which underlie the perception of consonants in noise remain poorly understood. In this study, native listeners identified 24 English consonants spoken by 8 talkers presented in 9 intervocalic contexts with varying stress position. Listeners were tested in 5 noise conditions: tokens were masked by stationary speechshaped noise, a competing talker, 3 and 8 speaker babble and speech-modulated noise, all of which have the long-term spectrum of speech. The rank ordering of consonant identification scores in stationary noise was highly-correlated (r=0.9, p<0.0001) with a similar condition reported by Phatak and Allen [JASA 121: 2312-2326, 2007], but less so in the 4 nonstationary noise backgrounds (r=0.74, p<0.001). In particular, /y/, /r/, /l/, /f/, /ch/, /sh/, /m/ and most of the plosives showed a wide variation in ranking. These findings suggest that, in addition to the long-term spectrum of the masker, consonant identification in noise is affected by other factors such as temporal fluctuations in the masker, misallocation of foreground/background components and attention.
