Abstract: Chinese consonant confusion matrices were obtained by means ofarticulation tests for natural syllables in several transmission conditions:low-pass or high-pass filtering with a masking noise, and passing througha numerical 2400 bits/sec vocoder. A MD-SCAL is used to analyze thesimilarities among Chinese consonants, and to test how well the space werepredicted by the traditional Chinese phonology. It has been found that theresults obtained for analogical and numerical transmission conditions arevery similar, so the configurations which are deduced from the confusionmatrices reflect the perceptual features of Chinese consonants. It is shownthat, the exceedingly important perceptual features of Chinese consonantswere interpreted as voicing, aspiration, frication and place (front/median/back) in the order of importance, they agree with traditional Chinesephonology, but the nasals and orals are not significantly contradictoryfeatures, it is different from some foreign languages.

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