Identification of natural whistled vowels by non-whistlers

Whistled speech consists of a phonetic emulation of the sounds produced in spoken voice. This style of speech is the result of the adaptation of the human productive and perceptive intelligence to a language behavior. In the typology of whistled forms of languages, Spanish is among the languages for which the whistled strategy emulates primarily segmental acoustic cues of vowels and consonants. The present study tests the perception of four Spanish whistled vowels by French non-whistlers. The results show that French non-whistlers were able to categorize these vowels without any learning, although not as accurately as native whistlers.