Whispered voiced consonants maintain distinct acoustic properties compared to their fully voiced counterparts
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Peer-reviewed literature demonstrates that whispered consonants preserve distinct acoustic properties—such as burst duration, intensity, and formant transitions—allowing listeners to distinguish voicing categories even in the absence of vocal fold vibration.
In the absence of voicing, the discrimination of ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stop consonants in whispered speech relies on such acoustic cues as burst duration and amplitude, and formant transition characteristics. The articulatory processes that generate these features of whispered speech remain speculative. This preliminary investigation examines the articulatory kinematics differences between whispered /p/ and /b/, which may underlie the acoustic differences previously reported for these sounds. Computerized video-tracking methods were used to evaluate kinematic differences between voiced and
Although the timing of the initiation and cessation of vocal fold vibrations is crucial to characterize the voiced and voiceless cognates, other cues, such as the duration of preceding vowels, the patterns of the formant transitions in the following vowels, and the period of stop closure, may also play important roles in performing these distinctions. The present study is to further investigate the role of tongue articulatory movements during voiced and unvoiced consonant production, specifically when the vocal folds do not vibrate during the production of fricative consonants, /s/ and /z/ in
Introduction: Whispered voice is characterized by the lack of voicing and the presence of friction noise except during the closed phase of plosives. However, segmental contrasts such as voicing tend to be preserved in whispered speech. Acoustic and perceptual studies have showed that formant frequencies and intensity were some of the phonetic parameters that allow the listeners to distinguish the voicing feature between normal and whispered modes. The aim of our study is to compare the laryngeal behaviour of whispered voice at the level of the glottis and of the supraglottic region using high
What's in a whisper?
Whispering is a common, natural way of reducing speech perceptibility, but whether and how whispering affects consonant identification and the acoustic features presumed important for it in normal speech perception are unknown. In this experiment, untrained listeners identified 18 different whispered initial consonants significantly better than chance in nonsense syllables. The phonetic features of place and manner of articulation and, to a lesser extent, voicing, were correctly identified. Confusion matrix and acoustic analyses indicated preservation of resonance characteristics for place and manner of articulation and suggested the use of burst, aspiration, or frication duration and intensity, and/or first-formant cutback for voicing decisions.
Published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (1989)
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