Tone Production in Whispered Mandarin

Abstract

Acoustic analyses of normal voiced and whispered Mandarin Chinese reveal significant differences in duration and intensity among the four lexical tones, differences that are moreover similar across the two speech genres. In contrast to previous claims, however, these differences among the tones are found to shrink in whisper rather than being exaggerated to facilitate perception. Furthermore, individual variation exists in the production of whispered tones, which are found to shorten or lengthen with respect to normal voiced tones depending on the speaker.