Miller-Nicely, 1955

Miller, George A. and Nicely, Patricia, ``An Analysis of Perceptual Confusions among some English Consonants'', J.Acoust.Soc.Am. 27:2, 1955.

5 female English subjects alternated as speaker and listeners in a classic experiment involving the consonants /ptkbdgfvsSzZmn/ in CV utterances, V being the vowel /a/ in 'father'. /S/ and /Z/ are the middle phonemes in 'pushing' and 'measure' respectively. Several S/N and frequency bands were tested, only a few of which are given here.

The 200-5000 Hz one is given as an example :

>> mn5000 = phonmat('html/nicely_plus12db_200to5000hz.dat');
>> mn5000.total

 pm (object of type PHONMAT) = 

    title: Consonant Confusions in CV utterances, for V=/a/, for S/N = +12db and freq response of 200-5000 Hz (Miller Nicely Table XII)
    Phones involved: 16, namely p t k f T (th) s S (sh) b d g v D (dh) z Z (zh) m n 

       p   t   k   f   T   s   S   b   d   g   v   D   z   Z   m   n      Total
    p  228 7   7   1   0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    p 244
    t  0   236 8   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    t 244
    k  26  5   213 0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    k 244
    f  6   1   1   194 35  0   0   3   0   0   1   3   0   0   0   0    f 244
    T  0   2   2   96  146 2   0   2   1   0   1   8   0   0   0   0    T 260
    s  0   2   0   1   31  204 1   1   9   4   0   7   0   0   0   0    s 260
    S  0   0   0   0   0   1   243 0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    S 244
    b  0   0   0   13  12  0   0   207 2   3   19  8   0   0   0   0    b 264
    d  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   240 9   0   0   0   3   0   0    d 252
    g  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   41  199 0   0   2   1   0   0    g 244
    v  0   0   0   3   3   0   0   20  0   2   182 47  2   0   0   1    v 260
    D  0   0   0   0   7   0   0   10  3   22  49  170 19  0   0   0    D 280
    z  0   0   0   0   1   0   0   3   8   24  2   22  145 3   0   0    z 208
    Z  0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   2   0   0   0   13  264 0   0    Z 280
    m  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   213 11   m 224
    n  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   248  n 248

There are 4000 entries in the matrix, and while each syllable was judged 250 times on average, stimuli were not evenly spread.