Publications

Listeners make mistakes when communicating under adverseconditions, with overall error rates reasonably well-predictedby existing speech intelligibility metrics. However, a detailedexamination of confusions made by a majority of listeners ismore likely to provide insights into processes of normal wordrecognition. The current study measured the rate at which robustmisperceptions occurred for highly-confusable words embeddedin noise. In a second experiment, confusions discoveredin the first listening test were subjected to a range of manipulations designed to help identify their cause. These experiments reveal that while majority confusions are quite rare, they occur sufficiently often to make large-scale discovery worthwhile. Surprisingly few misperceptions were due solely to energetic masking by the noise, suggesting that speech and noise “react” in complex ways which are not well-described by traditional masking concepts.