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What's in a whisper?

¹Department of Psychology, City College, CUNY, New York 10031.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|November 1, 1989

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Whispering allows for accurate identification of consonants, preserving key speech features like place and manner of articulation. This study reveals how acoustic cues in whispered speech aid consonant perception.

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Area of Science:

Speech Perception
Acoustic Phonetics

Background:

Whispering is a common method to reduce speech perceptibility.
The impact of whispering on consonant identification and acoustic features is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate consonant identification in whispered speech.
To determine how whispering affects acoustic features crucial for normal speech perception.

Main Methods:

Untrained listeners identified whispered initial consonants in nonsense syllables.
Phonetic feature identification was analyzed.
Confusion matrices and acoustic analyses were performed.

Main Results:

Consonants were identified significantly better than chance.

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Place and manner of articulation were accurately identified.

Voicing was identified to a lesser extent.

Acoustic analyses showed preserved resonance for place/manner and identified cues for voicing.

Conclusions:

Whispering preserves essential acoustic characteristics for consonant identification.
Specific acoustic cues like burst, aspiration, and formant changes are utilized for voicing perception in whispers.