Three-mode principal component analysis of confusion matrices, based on the identification of Dutch consonants, under various conditions of noise and reverberation

Abstract Dutch consonants, spoken in lists of two-syllable nonsense words of the type CVCVC which were embedded in short carrier phrases, were identified by listeners under various acoustic disturbance conditions. The 28 conditions were a mixture of four reverberation times, five signal-to-noise rations, and five different noise spectra. The identification results were summated over the six talkers and five listeners. In this way we achieved 28 confusion matrices per constant position (initial, medial, and final). These sets of matrices were processed by individual differences multidimensional scaling programs, and more specifically by TUCKALS (Kroonenberg and de Leeuw, [9]). The resulting three-dimensional stimulus configuration for the initial consonants is very stable and can be represented as a tetrahedron with /z, s/, /m, n/, /p, t, k, b, d/, and /f, v, χ/ at the four corner points and /l, r, w, j, h/ in the centre. This consonant configuration is discussed with respect to its relevance to the Dutch language given the experimental conditions. The representation of the 28 conditions turns out to be almost exclusively one-dimensional despite the three different aspects (reverberation time, noise level, noise spectrum) of the acoustic disturbances.