Do ありがとう and ありかどう sound the same when you are whispering?


In my first language (Cantonese), we do not have voiced consonant sounds like
Japanese. Therefore I have been struggling with the voiced and voiceless
differences in Japanese. I wonder if that Japanese speakers use voicing
distinction for differentiating, for example, the が and か, instead of
aspiration distinction like Cantonese speakers do, then would ありがとう and ありかどう
sound the same when they are whispered? (i.e. pure aspiration and no voicing)




As long as they are in a quiet room, Japanese people can hear the difference
between whispered か/が, た/だ, さ/ざ, etc., although the distinction is slightly
harder. I also confirmed this with my family. The voiced versions sounded
somewhat more "coarse" at the beginning of the syllable, and the difference
was clear enough to my ears.

Experts agree that it is generally possible to distinguish voiced and unvoiced
consonants even in whispers. Basically features other than voicing are used
for discrimination, but the strategy may vary from language to language or
from person to person:

  * [How are voiced and voiceless consonants distinguished while whispering?](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/19471)
  * [Whispered Voiced Consonants](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/2340)
  * [Quora: How are voiced and voiceless consonants distinguished while whispering?](https://www.quora.com/How-are-voiced-and-voiceless-consonants-distinguished-while-whispering)
  * [平岡睦津乃. 日本語のささやき発話における子音有声性の判別](https://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/record/2002764/files/ggr_043002.pdf) (recent extensive article in Japanese, PDF)  
[![Figure](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GJyiR.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GJyiR.png)  
This is the result of a listening experiment with 3 speakers and 15 listeners.
The table shows whispered voiced consonants (ささやき発話) can be discriminated with
slightly lower accuracy than in ordinary speech.

