Categorization of Whistled Consonants by French Speakers

Anaïs Tran Ngoc (1) , Julien Meyer , Fanny Meunier (1)

1 BCL, équipe Langage et Cognition

Whistled speech is a form ofmodified speechwheresomefrequencies ofvowelsand consonants areaugmentedandtransposed to whistling,modifying thetimbre andtheconstruction of eachphoneme.Thesetransformationscauseonly some elementsofthe signalto beintelligiblefornaivelisteners,which, according to previous studies, includesvowelrecognition.Here, we analyzenaivelisteners’ capacitiesforwhistled consonant categorization for four consonants: /p/, /k/,/t/ and /s/bypresentingthefindings oftwobehavioralexperiments. Though both experiments measurewhistledconsonant categorization,we used modifiedfrequencies-lowered with a phase vocoder-of the whistled stimuli in thesecond experimentto better identify therelative nature of pitchcues employed in this process.Results show thatparticipantsobtainedapproximately50% of correct responses(when chanceis at 25%).These findingsshowspecificconsonant preferencesfor “s” and “t”over“k” and “p”,specifically whenstimuli isunmodified.Previous research on whistled consonantssystemshas often opposed “s” and “t” to “k” and “p”,due to theirstrongpitch modulations. The preference for these two consonantsunderlines theimportanceof these cues in phonemeprocessing.

Mots clés: consonant categorization; whistled speech; whistledlanguages

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Anaïs Tran Ngoc, Julien Meyer, Fanny Meunier. Categorization of Whistled Consonants by French Speakers. Interspeech 2020, Oct 2020, Shanghai, France. pp.1600-1604, ⟨10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2683⟩. ⟨hal-03035412⟩