A perception experiment looking at patterns of which Arabic consonants are most confusable for listeners with different language backgrounds and whether confusions between pairs of consonants are symmetrical or strongly directional. Participants who were native or non-native speakers of Arabic listened to short nonce words played in background noise and chose the written form which they thought best matched the auditory stimulus. The patterns of identification errors suggest which acoustic features are salient to listeners, based on which sounds are most frequently confused and how identifications are influenced by the primary frequencies of the masking noise.