The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk:

Asymmetries in stop consonant confusions: A final thesis report

Madelaine C. Plauché UC Berkeley, ICSI, SRI

mcp		socrates.berkeley.edu

Tuesday, Dec 11, 2001 ICSI, Rm 607 12:30

Stop place identification studies of consonant vowel sequences (CVs) in English (and many other languages) report similar patterns: Listener errors vary by stop place, the following vowel, and confusion direction. Asymmetries in the direction of stop place confusions (e.g., [ki] is often confused for [ti], but [ti] is rarely confused for [ki]) have been noted by many researchers, but not yet adequately explained. Using a combination of classical perception experimentation, digital signal processing, and machine learning techniques, I evaluate previous accounts for asymmetries in stop place confusions (such as lexical frequency and markedness). Additionally, I investigate a new hypothesis: that listeners may disfavor stop places with greater token-to-token variation along a primary cue over those with less variation. The results show that when the acoustic signal is ambiguous, listeners rely on any factor available to them, including extra-phonetic factors, to categorize speech.