Human confusability of phonemes

[Tom Dietterich]

I am conducting a comparison study of several learning algorithms on
the nettalk task.  To make the comparisons fair, I would like to be
able to rate the severity of prediction errors made by these
algorithms.  For example, if the desired phoneme is /k/ (the k in
"key") and the phoneme produced by the learned network is /e/ (the a
in "late"), then this is a bad error.  On the other hand, substituting
/x/ (the a in "pirate") for /@/ (the a in "cab") should probably not
count as much of an error.

Can any readers point me to research that has been done on the
confusability of different phonemes (i.e., to what extent human
listeners can confuse two phonemes or reliably detect their
difference)?

Thanks,

Tom Dietterich

Thomas G. Dietterich
Department of Computer Science
Dearborn Hall, 306
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-3202