Perceptual cues of whispered tones: are they really special?

This paper reports our initial findings on whether Mandarin Chinese has developed effective strategies to convey tonal information in whispered speech. We recorded phonated and whispered tones in monosyllabic words, and analyzed the acoustic properties of the tonal contrasts. We then generated amplitude-modulated noise based on both the phonated and whispered utterances and used them as stimuli in a tone perception experiment, together with the original phonated and whispered speech. Results showed that, once turned into amplitude-modulated noise, originally phonated and whispered speech had similar perceptual patterns, and that these patterns resembled those of whispered tones. The acoustic analysis showed that properties corresponding to tonal contrasts in whispered speech already existed in the phonated tones, and there was no evidence of enhancement of these properties in whispering. Overall, therefore, Mandarin may not have developed highly special strategies to enhance tonal contrast in whispered speech. Index Terms: Tone perception, whispered speech, phonated speech, amplitude-modulated noise

[1]  Yi Xu.  ProsodyPro — A Tool for Large-scale Systematic Prosody Analysis , 2013 .

[2]  A. Samuel,et al.  Perception of Mandarin Lexical Tones when F0 Information is Neutralized , 2004, Language and speech.

[3]  Aniruddh D. Patel,et al.  The role of F0 variation in the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences , 2010, Speech Prosody 2010.

[4]  D. Broadbent,et al.  Realization of Prosodic Features in Whispered Speech * , 2017 .

[5]  Peter Birkholz,et al.  Construction And Control Of A Three-Dimensional Vocal Tract Model , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings.

[6]  D H Whalen,et al.  Information for Mandarin Tones in the Amplitude Contour and in Brief Segments , 1990, Phonetica.

[7]  J. Sundberg,et al.  Perceptual and acoustic correlates of abnormal voice qualities. , 1980, Acta oto-laryngologica.

[8]  Willemijn Heeren,et al.  Perception and production of boundary tones in whispered dutch , 2009, INTERSPEECH.

[9]  Peter Birkholz,et al.  Synthesis of Breathy, Normal, and Pressed Phonation Using a Two-Mass Model with a Triangular Glottis , 2011, INTERSPEECH.

[10]  W. Heeren,et al.  The interaction of lexical and phrasal prosody in whispered speech. , 2014, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  F. Minifie,et al.  Acoustical-perceptual correlates of "whisper pitch" in synthetically generated vowels. , 1999, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[12]  A. Abramson.  TONAL EXPERIMENTS WITH WHISPERED THAI , 1972 .

[13]  Gina-Anne Levow,et al.  The functional load of tone in Mandarin is as high as that of vowels , 2004, Speech Prosody 2004.

[14]  Yi Xu,et al.  Information for Mandarin tones in the amplitude contour and in brief segments , 1990 .

[15]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .