title: Sources of variability in consonant perception of normal-hearing listeners.
abstract: Responses obtained in consonant perception experiments typically show a large variability across stimuli of the same phonetic identity. The present study investigated the influence of different potential sources of this response variability. It was distinguished between source-induced variability, referring to perceptual differences caused by acoustical differences in the speech tokens and/or the masking noise tokens, and receiver-related variability, referring to perceptual differences caused by within- and across-listener uncertainty. Consonant-vowel combinations consisting of 15 consonants followed by the vowel /i/ were spoken by two talkers and presented to eight normal-hearing listeners both in quiet and in white noise at six different signal-to-noise ratios. The obtained responses were analyzed with respect to the different sources of variability using a measure of the perceptual distance between responses. The speech-induced variability across and within talkers and the across-listener variability were substantial and of similar magnitude. The noise-induced variability, obtained with time-shifted realizations of the same random process, was smaller but significantly larger than the amount of within-listener variability, which represented the smallest effect. The results have implications for the design of consonant perception experiments and provide constraints for future models of consonant perception.
authors.affiliation: Hearing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zaar
authors.affiliation: Hearing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Torsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dau
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult