Twenty‐nine consonants in the initial position and 31 consonants in the final position of CVC syllables were studied for perceptual confusions. The error matrices for consonants in initial and final positions showed significant differences in the response. A quantitative procedure was adopted to ascertain which features were most significant for listeners, and whether or not these were similar in the initial and final positions. The amount of information transmitted in bits per stimulus was calculated for all features and for each feature separately. The data indicated that the rank order of the features is not similar in the two positions. A comparison with observations made by earlier workers and with a recent work in this laboratory on intelligibility of consonants in clipped speech provided further evidence to show that the initial and final vowel transitions play different roles in the recognition of consonants.