Perception of Word Tones in Mandarin Whispered Speech
John Kwock-Ping Tse · 1996
The recognition of word tones in whispered speech may reveal the significance of fundamental frequency variation in speech sound perception. However, relatively few studies have been done on this aspect of tone perception and many issues remain unresolved. Among them are the question of how well whispered word tones can be recognized and the question of whether or not some tones are perceptually more salient than others. The present study attempts to address these two questions through a perception experiment. Our findings suggest that when fundamental frequency variation is absent, as in whispered speech, perception of word tones is greatly hampered if proper and larger linguistic contexts are also excluded, suggesting that not much word tone is transmitted in whispered speech. This is contraditory to Jensen's (1958) finding and provides some supporting evidence to Miller's (1961) finding, thus bringing some additional evidence to the answer and solution of the first question. As for the second question, we have significant findings which show that Tone 2 and Tone 3 in Mandarin are perceptually more salient in whispered speech; but we fail to find any acoustic correlates in the test items to account for this aspect of saliency. In the light of these results, we suggest that further studies be done to explore the possibility of the existience of other kinds of acoustic correlates and replications of the present experiment be carried out in order to seek better explanations for the perceptual saliency of Tone 2 and Tone 3 .in Mandarin whispered speech.