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CONFUSABILITY

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P72

2025-08-10

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CONFUSABILITY

The likelihood that, in a neutral context, a native speaker of a language will interpret a particular phoneme as another. Confusability varies somewhat according to the position of the phoneme in the sequence and to level of external noise; but some phonemes have been shown to be highly confusable. English speakers often interpret word-initial [p] as [k] and [T]as [f], even in conditions where there is no noise.

When English speech is put through a low-pass filter, eliminating higher frequencies in the signal, the consonants of the language appear to fall into certain groups within which confusion occurs and between which it does not often occur:

A research method in which subjects are asked to detect mispronunciations in a read-aloud text has added to our knowledge of which phonemic contrasts are most salient. It seems that the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is detected most readily for stops (70 per cent of mispronunciations detected) followed by affricates (64 per cent) and fricatives (38 per cent). The low score for fricatives may be perceptual (they contain relatively weak acoustic cues) or a matter of conditioning (they do not feature in a large number of voiced-voiceless contrasts in English). The same method suggested that subjects are accurate in detecting mispronunciations which involve place (80–90 per cent); and that (for some consonants), mispronunciations are more readily detected in word-initial position than in word-final. The latter finding suggests strongly that listeners pay special heed to the opening sounds of a word, as the Cohort model assumes.

See also: Intelligibility

Further reading: Clark and Yallop (1990: 309–22); Miller and Nicely (1955)