{"id":493,"date":"2006-08-22T17:21:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T09:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/toneless-whispers-and-tonal-languages\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T23:17:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T15:17:21","slug":"toneless-whispers-and-tonal-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/toneless-whispers-and-tonal-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"toneless whispers and tonal languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

John at Sinosplice<\/a> discusses how speakers of Sinitic languages, which are tonal, can understand whispered speech, which is not tonal. <\/p>\n

It turns out that when people whisper a tonal language such as Chinese, they naturally compensate for the lack of tones. How? According to one study:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the laryngeal sphincter mechanism is found to be a principal contributing physiological maneuver in the production of whisper, emphasizing the vertical rather than the horizontal component of the laryngeal source;<\/li>\n
  2. two special behavioral maneuvers are also used in whisper: male speakers tend to lengthen vocalic duration and female speakers tend to exaggerate the amplitude contours of Tone 3 and Tone 4;<\/li>\n
  3. these two special behavioral maneuvers and two temporal envelope parameters contribute to tone recognition in whisper, but the phonetic context is shown to be a distraction;<\/li>\n
  4. the environments of the target tones cause perceptual differneces, and the ranking of these environments in order of increasing degree of difficulty is: isolation, sentence-final, sentence-medial and sentence-final;<\/li>\n
  5. the ranking of the four tones in isolation, in order of increasing degree of perceptual difficulty is: Tone 3, Tone 4, Tone 1 and Tone 2.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    further reading: <\/p>\n