Perceptual analysis from confusions between vowels

In an experiment on vowel identification confusions were obtained between 11 Dutch vowel sounds. To recover the perceptual configurations of the stimuli multidimensional scaling techniques were applied directly to the asymmetric confusion matrix, and to the symmetrized confusion matrix. In order to investigate the agreement between the different solutions, all the configurations were matched to a perceptual configuration obtained in a previous study on the perception of the same vowel sounds in which similarities were obtained by the method of triadic combinations. The different solutions turned out to be very similar and in close agreement with the perceptual structure from similarity judgements. The solutions obtained by discarding the asymmetries first, showed the best correspondence with the perceptual similarity structure. In particular the solution based on Luce's choice axiom to correct for response bias seemed to be the most attractive.