Temporal masking alone masks brief consonants even without room reverberation.

Evidence

A plosive consonant is a typical example of a sound that is often masked by a preceding loud vowel. The effect occurs not only because of the reverberation of the room in which speech is received, but also in free-field conditions, because of the temporal effects of masking which characterize our hearing system. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s audio/psychoacoustics interest and to speech perception literature on consonant intelligibility.