The place of cues for the recognition of consonants

The purpese of the experiments reported was to establish a scale of hearing thresholds and intelligibility thresholds for Croatian sounds. The test material for the experiments consisted of all possible CV-type syllables. The result of the experiments show that the hearing thresholds depend on the vocalic syllable nucleus. The paradox is that the intelligibility thresholds for consonants are not relatedto the relative intensity of their noise parts, but primarily to the hearing threshold of the vowel in the syllable. Consonants in a syllable with /i/ have a 9 dB higher intelligibility threshold than consonants in a syllable with an /a/ vowel. These results support the well-known thesis that cues for the identification of consonants reside within vowel transients and not in zhe no~se parts of the consonant.