Realization of Prosodic Features in Whispered Speech

Abstract

Several investigators have dealt with the problem of whispering in tone languages. As the perception of pitch changes demands a certain degree of periodicity (voice) within the speech sounds, it was difficult to see how tonal features could be preserved in whispered speech. Observations with Chinese speaking people, however, had indicated that there is no remarkable loss of intelligibility if Chinese is whispered instead of being spoken normally. The same result was found in Indo-European languages where no tones are used as phonemically distinctive elements. Intonation here belongs to the suprasegmental (prosodic) features, different types of intonation being correlated with different speech situations. Experiments were carried out by using a visible-speech analyzer which demonstrate that changes of pitch in normal (voiced) speech are replaced by shifts of some formant regions in whispered speech, sometimes accompanied by considerable broadening of the formant regions due to an increased velocity of the air stream passing the glottal fissure.