Objective predicates of word intelligibility

There have been many attempts in the past to systematically attribute the physical properties of speech to subjective characteristics. The aim of this study was to look in more detail at how objective properties interact to contribute to the shape of performance‐intensity functions for individual words. The interaction of such features as speech level, familiarity, and spectral consistency were found to be complex but enlightening. In this study the largest effect is due to familiarity, however this is shown not to be as important under some conditions and for subsets of words with particular characteristics. Although the results shown by no means explain the whole story of speech perception, they do provide some insight into the play of factors for the fairly simple case of monosyllabic words. [This work was supported by the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK.]