General things that can cause phonemes to be misheard as other phonemes

[StrangerCoug]

A thread for discussing things (such as phonetic features, etc.) that, within a language or across languages, can cause phonemes to be misheard as something else.

• This thread was prompted by this news story about an alleged incident on Wheel of Fortune where a contestant called D a couple times, but some fans allegedly claim she was instead calling B. I am not sure where it's coming from—did she labialize it more than a typical English speaker? If someone good at transcribing audio to narrow IPA could enlighten me, I would appreciate it. (In the 90s, though, the same show had a contestant pronounce the letter D to sound closer to a G—OK, palatalization, but I'm sure they had a way to tell whether he was calling D or G. If I can find it on YouTube again, I'll let you know.)
• When I thought about it more, I was reminded of this site that collects mondegreens submitted by readers, some of which I was the one who submitted them. For example, I could have SWORN the line after "Good golly, miss Molly" in Good Golly, Miss Molly ended in "bomb", but apparently nope.
• And let's not forget the cross-linguistically common replacement of phonemes that do not exist in other languages getting replaced by their nearest-sounding equivalent. I intended this thread to focus on sources of confusion, but that doesn't mean there aren't mergers in non-native speech that native speakers don't make (e.g. "thin" being pronounced as any of "fin", "sin", or "tin" because the person's L1 has no /θ/).

[Whimemsz]

This thread was prompted by this news story about an alleged incident on Wheel of Fortune where a contestant called D a couple times, but some fans allegedly claim she was instead calling B. I am not sure where it's coming from—did she labialize it more than a typical English speaker?

Particularly in the absence of actually being able to see a person's mouth as they're talking, the cues for a listener to determine the POA of a speaker's plosive are the distortions of the formants (specifically F2 and F3) before the closure of and following the release of the plosive -- velars result in the formants "pinching" together, labials result in both formants dropping towards the plosive (i.e., lowering before it and rising after it), and dentals/alveolars have F3 steady and F2 moving toward its approximate mid range (so, basically, lowering in the case of high-ish front vowels and rising in the case of low or back vowels). So I assume (I'm not going to go to the trouble of pulling audio from this and looking at a spectrogram) that this woman's /di/ had a somewhat rising F2 and/or F3 on the following [ i], which, since the audience couldn't see a shot of her face, led to the plosive sounding kind of like [ b]. (It sounds way more like [d] than [ b] to me, for the record. And in context it's blindingly obvious she must have been saying /d/, given that enough of the letters were already present that "drinking from a coconut" was the most likely solution to the puzzle, and that she wouldn't have asked for the same letter twice in the bonus round! Not to mention in the bonus round you can actually see her face, and she's overenunciating so it's particularly clear that she's pronouncing a labial for the first consonant and a coronal for the third...) (See also, the McGurk Effect)

And let's not forget the cross-linguistically common replacement of phonemes that do not exist in other languages getting replaced by their nearest-sounding equivalent. I intended this thread to focus on sources of confusion, but that doesn't mean there aren't mergers in non-native speech that native speakers don't make (e.g. "thin" being pronounced as any of "fin", "sin", or "tin" because the person's L1 has no /θ/).

This isn't necessarily the same phenomenon (indeed, it often isn't). Although [θ] and [f] are acoustically/perceptually very similar, in general L2 speakers are aware that there's this extra phoneme /θ/, they just have great difficulty pronouncing it in normal speech, so they naturally substitute something from their L1 which is easier for them to produce. Like, I can pronounce trilled [r] easily enough if I'm speaking slowly, but it's difficult for me to do at conversational speed, so when I'm speaking Spanish I often fail at it and end up with a kind of Czech r-fricative thing, but this isn't because I don't know /r/ exists in Spanish or can't hear it and tell it apart from other sounds.

[Xwtek]

I have a question. What is the difference between dental consonant and alveolar consonant by formant?