The Effect of Whistled Vowels on Whistled Word Categorization for Naive Listeners

In this paper, we explore whistled word perception by naive French speakers. In whistled words of non-tonal languages, vowels are transposed to relatively stable pitches, which contrast with consonant movements or interruptions. Previous studies on whistled speech with naive listeners have tested vowels and consonants separately. Other studies on spoken word recognition have found that vowels and consonants contribute differently to intelligibility, where the role of vowels was highly mediated by the context. Here, naive participants recognize disyllabic whistled words above chance, and vowels are shown to contribute differently than consonants. When focusing on the role of vowels, we found different scales of performance between the vowels tested, mediated by their position in the word. We also highlighted the importance of the vowels' relative frequency difference (called 'interval') in the word.