Identification of intervocalic consonants in stationary and nonstationary noise

The factors which underlie the perception of consonants in noise remain poorly understood. In this study, native listeners identified 24 English consonants spoken by 8 talkers presented in 9 intervocalic contexts with varying stress position. Listeners were tested in 5 noise conditions: tokens were masked by stationary speechshaped noise, a competing talker, 3 and 8 speaker babble and speech-modulated noise, all of which have the long-term spectrum of speech. The rank ordering of consonant identification scores in stationary noise was highly-correlated (r=0.9, p<0.0001) with a similar condition reported by Phatak and Allen [JASA 121: 2312- 2326, 2007], but less so in the 4 nonstationary noise backgrounds (r=0.74, p