The Perception of Voicing in Whispered Stop Consonants

From the few studies that have beencarried out into whispered speech, it is apparent that listeners have little difficulty in perceiving vowels.Kallail and Emmanuel [1.2] presented lengthened and isolated vowels to their subjects and reported that between 63 and 65% were correctly identified when whispered compared to 80% when spoken normally.Tamer [3] improved on this study by presenting whispered CVC syllables following observations by Strange [4] that in normal speech.formant transitions are important for vowel identification.Tartter {3] found a better than 80% identi cation rate for 10 vowels whispered by 6 speakers compared to over 90% for the normally voiced vowels.Research into whispered consonants is relatively scarce.Tamer [5] presented Whispered consonant- [a] syllables to 6 listeners and found that the overall identification score was 64% with a 72% accuracy for identifying 'voicing'.However.given that her data included other consonants in addition to-stops it is dif cult to ascertain the levels of accuracy for the stop consonants alone.Dannenbn'ng [6] investigated 12 subjects' ability to discriminate between whispered oonsonants in CV syllables.where the vowel was either l.[ad or lul.Dannenbring's results show that listeners were able to make discriminations with