Normal-hearing subjects' perception of speech through one-third octave bands

Perceptual features of consonants were investigated from normally-hearing Ss' confusions of stimuli perceived through one-third-octave bands; 12 Ss were paid to respond to CVs consisting of 17 consonants, each paired with the vowels /i, a, u/ and filtered through one-third-octave bands centered at 0.5, 1, 2, 3.15 and 4 kc/s and one critical band (500 c/s wide) centered at 3.15 kc/s. An earlier cursory analysis of distinctive features in these data (Chari, N.C.A., Herman, G. and Danhauer, J.L. "Perception of one-third octave-band filtered speech." J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 1977, 61, 576-580) showed that while place features were severely affected by the filtering, manner and voicing features were not. The data were submitted in the present study to INDSCAL for a more a-posteriori investigation of the features and their weights by the Ss. Results showed some differences in the features and their weights across the various filter bands, but that they were similar to those found earlier for hearing-impaired Ss having losses corresponding to frequency cut-offs in this study.