Tones in whispered Mandarin

This paper examines and compares the characteristics of tones in a CV syllable in Mandarin under phonated and whispered speech. Formants of the vowel in various contexts are also compared across the tone environments in different phonation types, in order to assess whether and how tone environments and vowel production interacts, as the paper is interested as well in whether lack of fundamental frequency in whisper is compensated by other phonetic means in a tonal language. Results suggest that temporal correlates are maintained to a certain extent, and that the vowel space is shifted significantly towards higher frequency range.