This paper investigates the extent to which native speaker perceptions regarding the similarity between phonemes of English are influenced by their distributional properties. A similarity hierarchy model based on the distribution of consonantal phonemes in the English language was generated by creating phoneme-embeddings from contextual information. We compare this to similarity models based on phonological feature theory and on native speaker perception. Characteristics of the perception-based model are shown to appear in the distribution-based model whilst not being captured by the feature-based model. This not only provides evidence of similarity perceptions being influenced by distributional properties but is an argument for incorporating distributional information alongside phonological features when modelling perceptual similarity.