Unfolding of phonetic information over time : a database of Dutch diphone perception

We present the results of a large-scale study on speech perception, assessing the number and type of perceptual hypotheses which listeners entertain about possible phoneme sequences in their language. Dutch listeners were asked to identify gated fragments of all 1179 diphones of Dutch, providing a total of 488 520 phoneme categorizations. The results manifest orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal. Differences across phonemes in the rate at which fully correct recognition was achieved arose as a result of whether or not potential confusions could occur with other phonemes of the language (long with short vowels, affricates with their initial components, etc.). These data can be used to improve models of how acoustic-phonetic information is mapped onto the mental lexicon during speech comprehension.