Perception of 'voicing' in whispered stops

Amplitude measurements of 32 whispered tokens of /p/ and /b/ produced in four vowel contexts revealed that whispered /b/ tended to have a steeper rise slope relative to the following vowel than did /p/. In a perceptual experiment, short (60-ms) whispered stop + vowel utterances were played to 8 listeners. Their identification scores were significantly above chance, but lower than what might be expected for stop + vowel stimuli produced with normal voicing. The pattern of identifications showed no relationship to the measured rise time differences.