The alveolar consonants /d, n, l/ occur frequently in intervocalic position in conversational speech but have received little study for differences in their acoustic cues. Impaired‐ and normal‐hearing listeners were investigated for use of consonant‐segment versus transition‐segment cues to recognition of /d, n, l/ in /1C1/ tokens extracted from sentences. To examine the cues’ contribution to /d, n, l/ recognition, the segments were degraded singly or in combinations in the tokens as follows: [1C] or [C1]transitions were replaced by adjacent pitch periods from the respective vowels; the consonant segments were replaced by silence or by a synthetic consonant approximating the summed low‐frequency spectra of the /d, n, l/ murmurs. The results with normal‐hearing listeners showed that the presence of any one of the three segments, [1C] transition, [C1]transition, or natural consonant segment, supported a moderate to high level of /d, n, l/ recognition, depending on the phoneme. In contrast, the severely hearing‐impaired listeners’ consonant recognition was poor on the basis of transition information, but better in the presence of the natural consonants. The /1C1/’s with the synthetic consonant yielded chance level performance for the hearing‐impaired listeners but good consonant recognition for the normal‐hearing listeners—a further indication that cues in the transitions were quite useful for the normal‐hearing group but not for the hearing‐impaired group.