Individual normal-hearing listeners differ greatly yet each is internally consistent in consonant perception.

Evidence

Regarding the receiver-related effects, a substantial perceptual distance of 46 % across listeners was found for physically identical stimuli (light gray bar). In contrast, the relatively low perceptual distance of 30 % within listeners (test vs. retest, dark gray bar) indicated that the individual listeners were able to reproduce their responses fairly reliably. … Averaging consonant perception data (even across NH listeners) thus seems problematic. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5575

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘average listener’ as a fiction in psychophysics — averaging data across individual NH subjects may mask the real structure of perception, parallel to averaging across speakers in speech recognition systems.
• XREF: Mirrors the individual-variability findings and the critique of averaging that runs through the deeper soundscape and auditory literature.