Perceptual Discrimination of Whispered Phoneme Pairs

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the ability of 12 subjects to discriminate between whispered consonants that are differentiated, in normal speech, on the basis of voicing. In general, the subjects were able to make these discriminations, although certain phonemes (such as /d — t/) were easier to discriminate than others |ð−θ|. Possible acoustic features the subjects might be using to make these discriminations were discussed.