Monitoring Task in Speech Communication

Some communication situations involve several noisy channels, and only certain ones of these carry relevant information to a given communication operator. The operator must receive and identify a restricted number of different messages, and he must ignore others. The performance of the listener in this situation will depend both on the discriminability of the messages and on the listener's criterion for accepting his response as correct or rejecting it as incorrect. The present paper gives a quantitative description of the monitor's behavior in terms of the operating characteristic and the articulation‐criterion function. The results of two experiments are reported. In one of these, the confusion matrices for the various sets of messages were also determined.