Quantifying Consonant Contributions to Word Intelligibility via Acoustic Masking

The study introduces a scalable acoustic‑masking method to quantify how much each consonant contributes to word intelligibility. By silencing individual consonants in isolated words and measuring misrecognition rates with three ASR models, the authors define a mask‑induced misrecognition rate (MMR). Across English, Spanish, German, and Czech, MMR negatively correlates with phoneme frequency and positively with functional load, revealing that consonant importance varies by language.

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• llms
• multimodal