Rhyming Minimal Contrasts: A Simplified Diagnostic Articulation Test

The diagnostic approach to articulation testing examines the phonemic confusions in the responses made by an articulation test crew. Since a phoneme may be regarded as a sum of its essentially independent features or attributes (either the distinctive features or the conventional articulatory classifications of manner, place, and voicing), a phonemic confusion, or error in identification, may be regarded as a confusion in one or more of its independent attributes. A pair of phonemes which differ from each other in only a single feature or attribute is a minimal feature contrast, and an error in the identification of one of the phonemes for the other is a minimal feature confusion. Any phonemic confusion can be seen to be the sum of one or a number of minimal feature confusions. A test which includes all the minimal feature contrasts in a language can then estimate speech system performance for an input sample from the natural language. A previously reported test A. S. House, C. E. Williams, M. H. L. Hecker, and K. D. Kryter, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 37, 158–166 (1955) has been modified to include all the minimal feature contrasts for initial and terminal consonants. This modification is an easily interpreted tool for diagnostic research, and in addition, retains the desirable characteristics of the original test: case of administration and scoring, stable responses without learning effect, and use of of naïve listeners.