distinguish bad manners from bed manners

No - this blog entry is not about bad bediquette such as hogging double duvets in a double bed. Bad bed manners can be a threat to an otherwise happy marriage, as the Daily Mail reported in March 2010. As I'm not a trained marriage counsellor I shall refrain from commenting on such marital problems.
This entry, however, is about the vowels in bad and bed, had or head and similar words.The distinction between /e/ and /æ/ is notoriously difficult for German students of English to produce although it's rather easy to discriminate.
I carried out a tiny experiment with 38 German students of English, who attended my phonetics classes in 2010, an experiment, in which I made them listen to eight minimal pair sentences of the type:
I hope you will land/lend me a fish.
They heard one member of such a pair of sentences only, but saw both on a piece of paper. They were supposed to tick the one they believed to have heard.
Here are the sentences (the colour green marks the one they heard):

1. You can't say dad/dead on a gravestone
2. Charles confesses: I love Alan/Ellen
3. Will the man/men come?
4. This pan/pen leaks
5. They bought a lot of jams/gems from the specialty shop
6. He was sanding/sending some furniture when I called
7. I like Barry's/berries best
8. I hope you will land/lend me a fish

And these are the results in per cent:

1. 71/29
2. 16/84
3. 21/79
4. 05/95
5. 78/22
6. 82/18
7. 92/08
8. 87/13

BTW: It's a real eye-opener - sorry, ear-opener - to many a German student if such minimal pair sentences are used in an exercise: Student A reads out one of the two sentences and student B provides the appropriate answer. Here's an example:

student A	OO	student B
(a)Will the men come?	OO	I haven't invited them
(b)Will the man come?	OO	He's on his way here

So much for the auditory side of these two vowels. Articulatory aspects will be dealt with in a future blog entry.

PS: The sentences were taken from H. Eckert & W. Barry (2005) and  J.D. Bowen (1975). I'm always on the lookout for more minimal pair sentences. I'd be most grateful if you would post some more here.