Tone confusion in spoken and whispered Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese relies heavily upon the presence of a lexical tone to distinguish between otherwise homophonic words. In normal speech, lexical tone is conveyed primarily by means of a pitch contour which is imparted through control of the geometry and tautness of the glottis. Because of this importance, the relationship between pitch and Chinese tone, and its role in speech communications has been studied, and is relatively well understood. However the situation is different for whispered Chinese speech, in which the glottis remains open and is thus unable to influence pitch directly. For whispers, fundamental pitch is absent and can thus not be used to convey lexical tone. Does this then mean that the lexical tone of whispered Chinese is unintelligible? This paper reports the results of several experiments which have been conducted in order to investigate whispered Mandarin Chinese words in context-free carrier sentences.