Consonantal Context and Vowel Perception in Normal and Clipped Speech

Abstract

An experiment was done to study the effect of consonantal context on vowel perception in normal and infinitely clipped speech. In this experiment, 10 Hindi vowels | i, e, ∈, a, Λ, ɔ, o, U, u | were placed in | hΛj—J | and |hΛw—w| contexts, and recorded by two male speakers on a tape. The recordings were presented to six well-trained listeners with or without infinite peak clipping. Listeners' responses were summarized in a confusion matrix for each context and for each condition of testing. Thus, four confusion matrices were formed. Study of the confusion matrices reveals that the consonantal context does affect the perception of vowels in some of its aspects. Vowel intelligibility was found to be very different between the two contexts, while the relative intelligibility of vowels and specific confusions among vowels were not found to be significantly different.